The Actipro Blog

WPF Studio 2011.1 build 541 has been released and is now available for download. 

This maintenance release adds several major new features:

• Ribbon:  Updated the RibbonWindow title to center itself when possible, similar to Office 2010.
• SyntaxEditor:  Updated all text rendering to use the .NET 4.0 TextOptions.TextFormattingMode setting, when used in a .NET 4.0 application.  See our previous blog post on this subject.
• SyntaxEditor:  Added features to the Language Designer to support generation of lexical state ID and token ID classes for programmatic lexers.
• SyntaxEditor Web Languages Add-on:  Improved automated IntelliPrompt display.  See our previous blog post on this subject.

There were several bug fixes made in this build so we highly recommend that you update to it immediately if you have WPF Studio 2011.1 build 540.

See the announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

Sometimes you want to create your own icons from scratch or simply want to modify other existing icons. These scenarios are where our new Actipro Icons Elements product, which just launched, comes into play.

Actipro Icons Elements is a set of over 600 overlay icons that can be combined with any other custom or third-party icon to give new meaning to the icon. The overlays can be simple adornments or can represent various states/actions.

Usage Example

Say that you had an icon for an image that you obtained from either our Actipro Icons Essentials bundle or from a third-party, and you wanted to create an icon representing the action of sharing an image.

All you’d do is locate the “element” icon you wish to use from our Icons Elements set (in this case a hand glyph that commonly represents sharing), and use your favorite image editor (Photoshop, Visual Studio, etc.) to combine the two into a new icon.

Voila!  By combining existing icons with the professionally-designed overlay glyphs in this set, you can create an amazing number of customized icons, suited to your needs.

Icon Designs

Check out the icon designs below.  Note that the previews below are blurry for copy protection.  The real icons are crisp and clear.

Large Size

The Large size elements are ideal for overlaying 32x32 size icons.

Small Size

The Small size elements are ideal for overlaying 16x16 size icons.

We’re very happy to announce that v2.0 of our Actipro Icons Essentials product launched today, adding nearly 9,000 new images to the icon bundle!

If you have a need for high-quality icons to be used in a web site or application, please have a look at our product.  All our icons are crisp and clear in 32x32 and 16x16 sizes, unlike many competitors who design their icons at larger sizes and never clean up anti-alias artifacts that result when they are scaled down to smaller sizes.

As part of the new version, we added a new Development set and reorganized what previously was a Miscellaneous set into our other sets.

Upgrading to v2.0

If you are an existing Actipro Icons Essentials customer, you can upgrade to v2.0 with nearly 9,000 new images for just $30 per developer.  Bulk discounts are also available.  Please email our sales department for assistance with upgrading.

New Icon Designs

Check out the new icon designs added in v2.0 below.  Note that the red lines are for copy protection and do not appear in the real icons.

Basics (164 New Designs)

Communication & Management (183 New Designs)

Database (32 New Designs)

Development (144 New Designs)

Hardware & Networking (83 New Designs)

Imaging (25 New Designs)

Multimedia (75 New Designs)

People (84 New Designs)

Word Processing & Spreadsheet (18 New Designs)

We’ve made some more enhancements to the XML syntax language in our SyntaxEditor Web Languages Add-on, related to the automated IntelliPrompt completion list display. 

Our XML syntax language allows you to point it to an XSD schema and it will automatically show IntelliPrompt popups based on the schema data.  It’s really very slick and requires almost no work on your end to get going.

The updates described here apply to both the Windows Forms version of the add-on as well as the WPF version of the add-on.  More...

We’re excited to announce that in the next WPF Studio 2011.1 maintenance release (which will be build 541) we have updated SyntaxEditor to support “display” text formatting mode when that mode is specified in a .NET 4.0 application.

This was especially tricky to add since WPF Studio still targets .NET 3.5 where the options don’t yet exist.   But through the magic of reflection and other techniques, we now will fully support the .NET 4.0 text rendering options when SyntaxEditor is used in a .NET 4.0 app.

What is a Text Formatting Mode?

The TextFormattingMode enumeration, added in .NET 4.0, provides a Display option that can be set to indicate you would like rendered text to look good on displays.  This is beneficial when rendering smaller fonts, such as 10-12pt or smaller.

The other option, Ideal, is what is used by default and in pre-.NET 4.0 apps.  Ideal is best suited for use with larger font sizes since Display mode looks blurry when large font sizes are used or the text is scaled up.

A good summary of the text formatting API updates in .NET 4.0 is given here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/text/archive/2009/08/24/wpf-4-0-text-stack-improvements.aspx

Ideal vs. Display Comparison

Let’s look at a visual comparison between TextFormattingMode.Ideal and TextFormattingMode.Display.  For these screens we’re using Consolas at 13pt, which when using the “display” setting will allow your SyntaxEditors to render exactly like the VS 2010 code editor, with the same clarity.

Above is the default “ideal” setting, also used in pre-.NET 4.0.  It’s not really that bad looking in Consolas but you can see that some of the letters look a bit anti-aliased, especially in the quick info popup that is not using Consolas.

Now here is where we have applied the “display” setting instead.  The Consolas editor text is a bit crisper and the IntelliPrompt popups look much better.

Dynamic Mode Switch When Zooming

We also have implemented code to automatically force “ideal” mode when zooming in, such as with Ctrl+MouseWheel.  When text is scaled up using “display” mode, it looks very blurry.  Thus our code to force “ideal” mode kicks in whenever the SyntaxEditor.ZoomLevel property goes above 100%, thereby keeping text rendering clear in any scenario.

Summary

These new features will be very beneficial to those of you who use SyntaxEditor in .NET 4.0 apps since they will improve the clarify of text in the editor for your end users.

The features are ready to go for the next WPF Studio maintenance release build 541.