A very major new version of WPF Studio is now live and ready for download.  We’ll post more info on the updates in the coming days but a quick summary with links to related blog posts is:

• DataGrid: WPF Toolkit references to use latest Feb 2010 release.
• Editors: Added IsReadOnly property to PartEditBox and associated support to derivations.
• PropertyGrid: Added advanced support for collection types, such as lists and dictionaries, including inline editing.
• PropertyGrid: Added multiple new events to PropertyGrid for property value and collection changes.
• PropertyGrid: Improved customization abilities.
• Ribbon: Updated the application button to use the new Scenic style by default.
• Ribbon: Added underlines to menu item labels when a key tip access character is used in the label.
• SyntaxEditor: Added more configurable display classification types.
• SyntaxEditor: Added support for multiple highlighting style registries.
• Views: Added new Views product.
• All: Made several tweaks and bug fixes.
• All: Improved VS 2010 support.
• All: Switched to target the .NET 3.5 SP1 framework, instead of .NET 3.0, and updated all assembly names accordingly.

For a detailed change list, please see this announcement.

Upgrade notes

Since 2010.1 is a major new version, 2009.2 customers will need new license keys to use the 2010.1 version. 

If you are an existing customer and have an active subscription, you can log into your Actipro account and there should be a link near the top of your Organization Purchases page allowing you to request a free upgrade to 2010.1.

Alternatively if your subscription has expired, you can order a renewal from our purchasing pages.

If you are using individual WPF products but would like to switch to either the WPF Essentials bundle or WPF Studio suite, e-mail our sales team and we’ll be happy to discuss discounted upgrade options.

What’s next?

Be sure to check out our What we’re working on in early 2010 posting from several weeks ago, as that gives a high-level overview of where our development efforts are at right now.

Today’s WPF Studio 2010.1 release includes all the WPF Studio items in that posting.  In the coming weeks we are planning on adding more custom panels to the new Views for WPF product.

Our primary focus will be on finishing off the public beta for the first Silverlight Studio version though.  Since Silverlight 4 is coming out this week, we will be targeting it.  The first two controls in the Silverlight Studio bundle will be SyntaxEditor and Views.

We also will be working on getting the wpfpedia.com reference guide rewrite live in the coming weeks.  The code for it is about done, we just want to add some more content before publishing it.

As you can see, 2010 is off to a great start with our products and there’s plenty more coming soon.

We’ve added menu item access key underlines to all menu items in Ribbon for WPF.  This update will be in the upcoming WPF Studio 2010.1 release.

Ribbon’s application menu showing underlines for menu items and recent document items

This update doesn’t require any changes to your code in most cases either.  What we do is look at the KeyTipAccessText property of the buttons you use for your menu items.  If it is a single character and the character is found in the button’s label text, it will underline the character.

A context menu showing the access key underlines 

Our algorithm will even give priority to uppercase letters to be underlined so note that in the Save As item above, the uppercase A as underlined instead of the a in Save.

And of course typing an underlined character while a menu is displayed will execute the related menu item.

We hope to launch WPF Studio 2010.1 with these new features and more next week.

We’ve been posting recently on some upcoming features being added to Actipro Ribbon for WPF that will be available in the upcoming WPF Studio 2010.1 release.

Today I’d like to show an interesting new feature where you can hide the title bar area of the Ribbon.  Combined with other existing properties that hide the application button, hide the QAT, and prevent ribbon collapsing, you can achieve a standalone tab control that has full ribbon resizing capabilities in it for groups and group child controls.

This screenshot shows the result, which could be used standalone within any control.  A new QuickStart has been added in WPF Studio 2010.1 showing how to do this.

Update: Just to clarify, this feature doesn't mean that Ribbon can be used as a tab control replacement.  Ribbon can still only host ribbon groups and controls you'd normally host in a ribbon group.  It's just showing how the title bar area where contextual tabs and the QAT would normally be are hidden with a new property.  And in this particular sample we hid the application button as well.

Part of the features being added for WPF Studio 2010.1 are Ribbon updates to use the newer Scenic ribbon style. 

The new application button style will display the text content File by default as in the left of this screenshot.  This is similar to how the upcoming Office 2010 renders their application button.

You could choose to use an image instead.  When using an image, an arrow will render next to the image further indicating to the user that this is a button that should be clicked on.

The image displayed on the right side of the screenshot is built-into Ribbon and can be used by your applications if you’d like.  Alternatively you may specify a custom image to use, such as a company or application logo icon.

The WPF Studio 2010.1 version that is planned for release in April includes a number of updates to Ribbon.  We’ll highlight some of these over the coming days.

Ribbon templates updated to the “Scenic” look

Many customers have voiced their opinions that we need to migrate to the newer ribbon look that is in the Windows 7 “Scenic” ribbon, and the Office 2010 ribbon.  So that’s what we’ve done… here is a preview of how the Ribbon will look in the 2010.1 version:

And here is a screenshot of the Ribbon in its Office blue theme when not using glass, and the application button is clicked… More...

We’ve been getting a lot of e-mails asking about what we’re currently working on, when new releases are planned, etc.  So I’d like to give an update on our plans for the next couple months.

WPF Studio 2010.1

We’re working hard on WPF Studio 2010.1.  Our plan is to have it out in the April or May 2010 timeframe at the latest.  Here are some of the updates we have planned for it:

Target .NET 3.5 SP1

As mentioned in a previous blog post, WPF Studio 2010.1 will move to target .NET 3.5 SP1.  This will enable us to take advantage of new features that aren’t available in .NET 3.0.

Source codebase move to VS 2010

All our source code for WPF Studio will be moved to VS 2010 projects.

VS 2010 sample projects

WPF Studio 2009.2 ships with VS 2008 projects that can be converted to VS 2010 format when they are opened in VS 2010.  Our designer functionality in 2009.2 already has been designed to function in VS 2010 properly.  However to make things easier for customers, we will ship VS 2010 and VS 2008 variations of the sample projects in WPF Studio 2010.1, thereby saving you from having to run the project conversion in VS.

New WPF control product

A brand new WPF control product is being developed that will ship with WPF Studio 2010.1.  We’re pretty excited about it and will give some more information on it when we get closer to release.

Ribbon updates

We’re working on updates for the Ribbon control to make it look more like Office 2010.  In addition, the glow effects in the title bar will be created with shader effects since the bitmap effects we previously used are no longer supported in .NET 4.0.

SyntaxEditor updates

The ability to create and support multiple highlighting style registries has been added.  This means that you can have one registry set up for general code editing, another for console windows, etc.

Miscellaneous

Other miscellaneous updates will be included for various products.

Silverlight Studio 2010.1

We’re excited to finally be bringing to market some Silverlight controls.  They will initially be released in a new Silverlight Studio 2010.1 bundle, due out when or soon after WPF Studio 2010.1 is released.

What’s included?

The first Silverlight Studio version will include a beta release of our SyntaxEditor control, and a Silverlight version of the new unnamed product that is being added in WPF Studio 2010.1.  There also is a Silverlight Shared Library that has a bunch of helpful common components and controls.

Silverlight 3 or 4?

Right now our code is being developed for SL3, but we may switch to SL4 if it is released before Silverlight Studio is ready to go.  This could add a small delay in our release date but we’d much rather support the latest and greatest, especially since SL4 will enable us to support some additional SyntaxEditor functionality in the future that we can’t do in SL3.

Building a product infrastructure

We’re currently working on building a product infrastructure for Silverlight that helps aid in code compatibility between Silverlight and WPF.  Since this is the first time we’re getting into Silverlight, we’ve had to construct a new product licensing mechanism, a new control theming mechanism, and other infrastructure items needed to support a set of quality commercial controls.

We’ve been building a new Sample Browser for our Silverlight controls too, similar to our WPF Sample Browser.  We’ll try and get some screenshots posted soon.

WPFpedia.com reimplementation

We have been planning a complete reimplementation of our wpfpedia.com reference guide site for a while now.  It will become a completely separate web site from our main Actipro site and has been rebuilt from scratch using ASP MVC and the latest web technologies to provide the ideal place for you to go when trying to learn how to do something in WPF.

More news on this very soon!

Summary

As you can see, there are a lot of items on our plate right now but we’re chugging through them.  2010 is going to be an exciting time for us and our customers, especially with the new development tools like Visual Studio 2010 coming our way shortly.

WPF Studio 2009.2 and just been released and is available for download now.  This new major version has some enormous updates in it, the larger of which we’ll describe below.

See our related forum announcement for exact details on what updates were made in each product.

	Docking/MDI for WPF Floating document functionality like in Visual Studio 2010 Document windows in 2009.2 support the ability to be dragged out of the MDI area and floated.  This allows end users to move documents to secondary monitors.  This has been a very highly-requested feature by our end users.  The functionality matches what is found in Visual Studio 2010. All floating windows can now be maximized, and a custom chrome is used to render floating window titlebars and borders. This previous blog post talks about the new features in more detail.
	Editors for WPF AnalogClock control added A new AnalogClock control is now included that can render a clock with hour, minute, and optional second hands.  The hands can be dragged to set new time values. EnumListBox control added EnumListBox is a new control that makes it extremely easy to pick between enumeration values using checkboxes or radio buttons.  It even can render alternate display text based on Description attributes. EnumEditBox control added The new EnumEditBox control is an editor implementation that has a dropdown with an EnumListBox.  When the dropdown is closed, the selected enumeration value is displayed. DateTimeEditBox updated to display clock in dropdown The popular DateTimeEditBox control has been updated to display a time entry section on its dropdown when a date/time or time-only value are edited in it. The DateTimeEditBox will automatically toggle whether a month calendar and/or clock are available in the dropdown based on the date/time format used for the control.
	Navigation for WPF ZoomContentControl added Need a control that provides an intuitive interface for navigating around large content?  The new ZoomContentControl has what you need.  It is extremely configurable, and allows for easy zooming/panning and other operations. This sort of control is perfect for browsing around content such as large pictures, maps, reports, designers, and more. Custom buttons (like the Open Image button above) or other controls can be easily embedded in the UI.
	Ribbon for WPF In-ribbon galleries add support for multiple display rows You asked for it and we delivered.  In-ribbon galleries now support more than one display row if the height of the items can fit more than one row. The rows even animate up and down as you scroll between them.
	SyntaxEditor for WPF Tagging mechanism added Tagging is an exciting new feature area that allows any text range in a document to be “tagged” with custom data.  This data could be anything from custom classifications to something that indicates a squiggle line should be drawn when the text is rendered. Adornments mechanism added The new adornments features allow any custom UI elements to be inserted into the text area surface.  This is one of the most exciting feature areas added to SyntaxEditor since it opens up the doors for providing amazing visualization customizations to end users.  Our favorite demo of adornments is the sample that shows how to make animated smoke puff near the caret as you type.   See this previous post that talks about a number of new samples that show off ideas for adornment usage. Squiggle line support added A built-in adornment layer supports squiggle line rendering.  Now you can “tag” document text ranges that have syntax errors and the squiggles will show up automatically in SyntaxEditor. New event sinks and improved language service design We’ve added a number of new event sinks that let your syntax language classes process when new documents or views are attached to or detached from the language.  A number of language services have been opened up so that more than one instance of a service type can be registered.  This means you could have two completion provider services in place, etc. More documentation We’ve added a lot more documentation, especially in the area of language creation.  Our language creation walk-through topic now also gives a table of common syntax language features and links to the steps/services needed to implement them.
	All controls Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend 3 designer support added Version 2009.2 adds designer support for Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend 3. New samples added We’ve added a number of new QuickStarts for the various products to demo controls and features.  SyntaxEditor alone is up to about 55 full source samples.

Upgrade Notes

Since 2009.2 is a major new version, 2009.1 customers will need new license keys to use the 2009.2 version. 

If you are an existing customer and have an active subscription, you can log into your Actipro account and there should be a link near the top of your Organization Purchases page allowing you to request a free upgrade to 2009.2.

Alternatively if your subscription has expired, you can order a renewal from our purchasing pages.

If you are using individual WPF products but would like to switch to either the WPF Essentials bundle or WPF Studio suite, e-mail our sales team and we’ll be happy to discuss discounted upgrade options.

We just posted a new WPF Studio build that addresses a measure issue found in the build 504 SyntaxEditor completion list.  It also updates the completion list to auto-resize the width based on current items in the list when filters are applied.

RibbonWindow received a number of changes to make it function and look better in Windows 7.  DataGrid got a minor Aero theme tweak and Editors got a small bug fix.

The new build is now live.

Yesterday evening we published WPF Studio 2009.1, which includes the first SyntaxEditor for WPF public beta and the official release of Editors for WPF.  These products have been highly requested by our customers so we’re very pleased to get them out into your hands.  More...

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!