The latest maintenance release 4.5.0475 of WPF Studio adds new attractive Aero themes for Ribbon and NavigationBar.  These new Aero themes match great with our other WPF products such as Docking & MDI.

Additionally we've added a Change Theme button to the top of our Sample Browser.  This lets you quickly set the application-wide theme for the Sample Browser.  You can even use the Change Theme button in our XBAP live demos.

Ribbon Aero Theme

Note how Ribbon and Docking & MDI now look great together in Aero.  The above screenshot was taken with glass effects disabled so that you can see how RibbonWindow renders with its Aero theme when used on XP systems.

NavigationBar Aero Theme

Enjoy the updates!

Today's WPF Studio maintenance release added a new Aero theme for the ExplorerBar control.

The screenshot above shows the normal and alternate styles for ExplorerBar items.  In addition, when the mouse moves over a header, the header changes its background to reflect the hover state.

We've done a lot of blogging in the past couple of weeks on new WPF controls that were being prepared for the next maintenance release of WPF Studio v3.5.  Well, I'm pleased to announce that all those controls are now live with today's latest build 425.

New Controls and Components

A slew of new controls and components are included in this build.  Here is a brief list of the major new ones, with links to the previous blog posts that describe them:

• Breadcrumb control, like the Vista explorer addressbar
• Ribbon textbox and combobox hint text
• Aero wizards
• Vista-like command button for use in Aero wizards and task dialogs
• Animated progress bar
• Popup button control, with the ability to show context menu or any other WPF content in its drop-down
• Glass window class, which makes it easy to extend Aero glass into the client area of the window
• Many new value converters, enumerations, and helper methods

Improved Documentation

Our already-thorough documentation has been further enhanced, with a lot of new topics. 

Many New Samples

We've continued to add many new samples to the Sample Browser with this build.  In fact, there are 16 new samples added in this maintenance release!

How to Download?

If you already own WPF Studio v3.5, just go to your Organization Purchases page and download the new maintenance release from there.  If you don't own WPF Studio v3.5, you can get it from the Download page.

We're getting very close to having the next big maintenance release for WPF Studio v3.5 ready.  One of the larger new controls that is part of Wizard is the new AeroWizard control.  AeroWizard inherits our normal Wizard control but provides a custom UI that mimics the style of wizards found in Windows Vista.

Note that all of the glass rendering and title bar area is handled for you.  We have a special AeroWizardWindow class that is a Window intended to contain an AeroWizard.  You can interact with the expanded title bar region just like you would in the true non-client title bar area of the window, meaning double-click to toggle maximization, click and drag to move the window, right click to display the system menu, etc.

In Aero wizards, the Back button appears in the title bar to keep consistency with the other Vista explorer windows and task dialogs.

Since AeroWizard inherits Wizard, it supports all the many features you've come to love in the core Wizard product, including command-base page switching, animated page transitions, and much more.

Want to get started building Aero wizards fast?  The new build will include a VS 2008 item template that gets you going in seconds with a fully-functional Aero wizard template window.

Command Buttons

No Aero wizard is complete without the special buttons called command buttons that sometimes allow for choices within the main page area.  We've fully implemented command buttons for you, and they even have the smooth animation when you move the mouse over them or click on them.

We're very excited to offer Aero wizards in WPF Studio with the upcoming release.

We had a customer write us the other day mentioning that ClearType was turning off when using our RibbonWindow class in Windows Vista with Aero enabled and was falling back to grayscale antialiasing. 

After a lot of debugging and searching, we found that the root of the problem was the use of Vista's Aero glass in the client area of a Window in WPF.  Basically if glass is disabled or not available (like in Windows XP), everything is fine and renders properly using ClearType.  However if you implement your WPF Window such that glass can enter the client area (like in our RibbonWindow or previously-posted GlassWindow that is soon to be released), ClearType will disable and grayscale antialiasing will be used instead.

We traced the line that causes the issue down to this one, which is necessary for any WPF Window to properly support Aero glass in its client area:

// Ensure the background of the composition target is transparent
HwndSource.FromHwnd(hwnd).CompositionTarget.BackgroundColor = Colors.Transparent;

Basically if the Colors.Transparent is set to the Window's composition target, ClearType becomes disabled.  If you don't set this however, then glass is not able to enter the client area of the Window.

Here is a great post by Dax Pandhi on how to enable Aero glass in WPF Windows.

In there you can see how the line of code above is used to notify Win32 to use a transparent background for the client area of the window.

After some more searching on Google, we found this post too which explains the issue a bit more:

Give me back my ClearType

That post shows some screenshots of the issue and is very helpful for telling what things will cause ClearType to disable.

I've posted a question about this issue in the Microsoft WPF forum and hopefully Microsoft will do something about this in the future.

Another new control in the upcoming Actipro WPF Studio v3.5 maintenance release is GlassWindow.

It is a normal Window however adds some additional property that allow you to extend Aero glass effects in Vista into the client area of the window.  It's very simple to use, you just ensure IsGlassEnabled is true and set the thickness of the client area glass that you want.

As an added feature, you can set the glass thickness to -1 to make the entire background of the window be glass.

The next control I'd like to introduce for the upcoming large WPF Studio 3.5 maintenance release is the AnimatedProgressBar control.

The AnimatedProgressBar control is essentially like a standard native WPF ProgressBar except that it has numerous improvements:

1. The AnimatedProgressBar supports multiple built-in themes and fully implements Actipro's themes management framework, allowing you to change themes on the fly at run-time.
2. AnimatedProgressBar supports three operation modes... the normal mode displays progress like normal, but warning (yellow-colored progress) and error (red-colored progress) modes can be entered during times when input is needed by the end user.  This makes it clearer when user input is required in the middle of long operations.
3. AnimatedProgressBar uses smooth animation to slide its indicator to the desired target value.  A normal progressbar "jumps" directly to new values.  The animated slide creates a more visually appealing effect.
4. An option to use a continuous indicator (instead of the default segmented one) in non-Aero themes.