Sorry for the lack of blog posts recently. We’ve been hard at work on some major new features coming to WPF Studio that we’ll be announcing in the coming couple of weeks. More on that soon!
But on a side topic, as you all know, Microsoft’s BUILD conference was a couple weeks ago and we took some time off our normal development plans to digest all the information about WinRT and Metro style user interfaces. We’ve done some initial examinations of the XAML UI framework to compare it to Silverlight (it’s more like Silverlight than WPF) and look into the feasibility of porting some of our controls like SyntaxEditor to it.
We’ve identified several missing feature areas in WinRT that would make it difficult/impossible to port SyntaxEditor to it. The good news is that we’ve spoken directly with Microsoft PMs on some of these issues and with enough community interest, we can hopefully get the priority bumped up on them so they are there by the Windows 8 RTM.
What Would You Do With a Metro SyntaxEditor?
Continuing on that train of thought, we need your help!
We want to know if you see a use for bringing a control like SyntaxEditor (our syntax-highlighting code editor control) to Windows 8 Metro. If you do, please either post a comment below or e-mail our sales team directly with information such as:
- What would you do with a Metro-fied version of SyntaxEditor? Please give specifics such as “writing a HTML editor”, or “app to post code snippets to a web site”, or “want to edit C# expressions”.
- Would you use multi-line mode, single-line mode (coming in 2011.2), or both?
- What core feature sets (syntax highlighting, code outlining, etc.) would you need in it, in the event it become somewhat of a “lite” version of the editor?
- Which language options would you want to see this for? Options are .NET (C#/VB), Javascript, and C++. Please note that there are numerous design limitations that come into play if Javascript and C++ are to be supported, which will limit some functionality.
- What UI issues can you forsee considering Metro is a touch-first oriented platform and a control like SyntaxEditor generally uses keyboard input. In the case where a keyboard is not present, the soft keyboard would need to be used.
- Any other related comments or thoughts.
We are compiling this information to present to our Microsoft contacts so please do respond quickly.