We've had metro themes in our WPF control products for over a year now and recently announced that they are getting some very nice updates for their 2014.1, with a number of refinements and enhancements.

Today I'd like to announce that a Metro Light theme is coming to our WinForms Controls as well!  This new theme gives your WinForms apps a Visual Studio 2013-like appearance.

Theme Description

First, we've added an additional option to the WindowsColorSchemeType that is called MetroLight and uses a flat color scheme similar to Visual Studio 2013's look.

Next, we created brand new renderers for our Bars, Docking/MDI, and Navigation products that draw the controls using the Metro appearance.  SyntaxEditor and Wizard already look good in Metro Light with their existing renderers.

Here's the Bar Controls demo, showing off the new theme:

Notice how the entire window has a nice flat appearance and subtle touches like the dotted gripper title bars are included.

Summary

This great theme addition to give your WinForms app a fresh new Metro look will be available in the 2014.1 version of our WinForms Controls.

The past couple days, we've been working on enhancing our popular Metro Themes, mostly focusing on refinements and improvements to their use in our Docking/MDI product.

Our Metro Light, White, and Dark themes have been available since v2012.2 and not only theme the Actipro controls you use in your projects, but also can theme all the native WPF controls.  This allows your entire app to mesh together cleanly with a polished, professional appearance.

Theme Updates

Let's dive in and take a look at some of the updates that are coming.  First, here's a screenshot of our main Docking/MDI demo with the updated Metro Light theme:

Improvements include:

• Lighter dock site background that blends better with the window background.
• Subtle outline borders around the tabbed MDI and tool window containers.
• Tool window container title bars are no longer as in-your-face when not focused.
• Tool window container title bars now have a dotted region that help relay that they are grippable.
• New auto-hidden tool window tab appearance that is more like Visual Studio 2013.
• Tool window tab images hidden by default in Metro themes (but can be toggled back via a new option).
• Slightly lighter control backgrounds in Metro Dark theme.

Here's the same window in our Metro Dark theme:

Summary

Our feature rich Docking/MDI product, combined with our enhanced Metro themes, really provide sleek and clean docking window functionality for your WPF apps.  You won't beat the attention to detail that our themes provide.

These new features will be available in the 2014.1 version of Docking/MDI.

SyntaxEditor for WPF has a free add-on included with it that provides integration with ANTLR 3.4 parsers. The add-on is described in detail in this blog post from several years back.

What is ANTLR?

ANTLR, ANother Tool for Language Recognition, was created by Terence Parr and is one of the most widely-used parsing frameworks available.  ANTLR is a framework for constructing recognizers, interpreters, compilers, and translators from grammatical descriptions containing actions in a variety of target languages. ANTLR provides excellent support for tree construction, tree walking, translation, error recovery, and error reporting.

SyntaxEditor for WPF customers know that we also have our own LL(*) Parsing Framework that has a lot of benefits over ANTLR, but due to the general popularity of ANTLR, we are pleased to support it as well.

ANTLR v4

In the past few months, ANTLR v4 was released.  There is updated tooling for Visual Studio that allows ANTLR v4 parsers to generated.  The thing is that the entire infrastructure of ANTLR parsers has changed in v4, and with those breaking changes, it prevents our add-on from working.

In ANTLR v3, you could run the parser on the document text via our add-on (and in a worker thread so it doesn't block the main UI thread), and it would return the AST results of the parsing operation asynchronously when it completed.

In ANTLR v4, the parser is not the same as there is no automatic AST generation.  Parse results can be examined via the use of the visitor pattern or a parse tree walker.  If you wish to have your own AST, you have to roll your own and construct it using a visitor or walker.  This change negates a lot of the features our add-on provided since now, you basically must hand code an IParser service to install on your language.  SyntaxEditor is fully extensible for any custom parsers, so this can be added easily.  It's just that whatever code you need to do to generate an AST or other parse data by walking the parse tree must now be custom written.

What Do You Want?

We are writing this blog post to see what you, our customers, would like to see from us in terms of ANTLR support.  Do you still wish to have our add-on support ANTLR v3 as we move forward? 

The only piece that is really useful from our ANTLR add-on when used with the newer v4 design is the ICharStream implementation that allows the parser to directly read from our text storage facility.  Since it's only one class, do we just include it open source somewhere or make a separate v4 binary with it in there?

We'd love to hear your thoughts… Please comment below or email our support address!

Code Writer v2.2, our free text/code editor app, is now live in the Windows Store.  This version focuses on adding major new find/replace-related features. 

Are you interested in adding code or text editing abilities to your own Windows Store apps?  SyntaxEditor for WinRT/XAML was recently released, allowing you to build apps just like Code Writer.  Download a free evaluation to try it out.

Check out all the new features added to Code Writer…

New Find/Replace Pane Search Options

The Find/Replace Pane now includes search options for match case, whole word, and use regular expressions.

The buttons to toggle them only appear when the pane is fully-expanded.  When collapsed, it will look like this:

The selected options appear in subtle small text below the Find What field.  If no options are selected, that entire text row disappears so no screen space is wasted.

Regular Expression Insertion Options

Drop-downs with insertion options for find/replace fields appear when in regular expression mode.

In the screenshot above, the Find What field's drop-down button is clicked, displaying a popup menu of available regex syntax options.

Incremental Search

Incremental search is a way for the end user to quickly search for text in a document without needing to interact with search dialogs or panes.  With a couple keyboard strokes, the end user can instantly start searching for text.

Ctrl+I enters the new incremental search mode, which is a feature that allows for fast text searching via the keyboard. Ctrl+Shift+I searches backward.  See this previous blog post on how incremental search works.

Search Match Highlights

An editor settings option has been added for the new search match highlights feature.

Search matches are highlighted in the editor, even as you change search options in the Find/Replace Pane.  In the screenshot above, we have searched for the text "using", and all instances of it are automatically highlighted.

Find Next Instance of Selected Text

Improved Delimiter Auto-Completion

Miscellaneous

Numerous miscellaneous improvements have also been made:

• Improved logic to prevent opening multiple instances of the same document.
• Improved PHP syntax highlighting.
• Documentation on touch interaction in the Editor screen.
• Fixed issue with touch-based scrolling working in certain scenarios.
• Fixed where Ctrl+Tab was cycling two documents forward instead of one.
• Fixed unsaved documents showing empty tab tooltips.

Summary

This update significantly improves the searching features of Code Writer and we highly recommend that you upgrade to it.

You can also download a free evaluation of our SyntaxEditor control for WinRT/XAML, which lets you add advanced code and text editing to your own Windows Store apps.

One feature that has been requested by a number of customers for our Docking/MDI product is to be notified of when a tool window that is auto-hidden flies out or back in, such as the Error List tool window in the screenshot below:

We just completed adding two new events to DockSite named WindowAutoHidePopupOpened and WindowAutoHidePopupClosed.  Each even passes an event args that specifies which tool window is being opened or closed.

These new features will be available in the 2014.1 version of Docking/MDI.