We’ve just released Silverlight Studio 2010.1 build 101.  We’ve got some great new features in this build.

ToolBar gets overflow and vertical orientation capabilities

As described in this previous post, the ToolBar control in our Shared Library has been updated to support overflow of controls to a popup and vertical orientation.

The screenshot above shows both features in action.

SyntaxEditor’s new EditorSearchView control

SyntaxEditor for WPF has a great control called EditorSearchView that you can drop into a window and instantly provide find/replace functionality to you end users.

With today’s release, now SyntaxEditor for Silverlight has it too.  You can quickly toggle between find and replace modes using our ToolBar control and all of the standard find/replace options are available to the end user.

SyntaxEditor adds a context menu

Finally, we’ve added a default context menu to SyntaxEditor for Silverlight to make it even more user-friendly.

The context menu has the standard editing options available.

Summary

The new build is live right now.  Check out the announcement post for change details.  Enjoy!

Our Silverlight Studio bundle contains a custom ToolBar control in the Shared Library, along with Menu and ContextMenu controls.

Here is how it looks in the default Aero theme, although the current official release doesn’t yet have the overflow button at the end.  That is a new feature that has been added for the next maintenance release.  Basically the overflow button is disabled unless there isn’t enough space to display all of the child controls.

In that case the overflow button can be clicked to display a popup that contains all of the child controls that weren’t able to fit on the main toolbar.  The Office black-themed screenshot above shows the overflow popup.

In addition, we’ve added vertical orientation capabilities as seen in the Office blue-themed screenshot above.  By setting the new Orientation property to Vertical, the toolbar renders vertically and even auto-rotates the background/border brushes and padding for you.

These new features will be in the next maintenance release of Silverlight Studio.

After many months of hard work, we’ve finished the first version of Silverlight Studio and have released it to the public!

Products

Silverlight Studio contains these products:

• SyntaxEditor for Silverlight - A syntax-highlighting code editor control and parsing suite for creating online IDEs.
• Views for Silverlight - Advanced Silverlight Panels that support fluid animated item layout.
• Shared Library for Silverlight - A set of common controls, useful components, and themes for Silverlight applications.

We’re really excited to see what our customers do with SyntaxEditor, since that sort of control opens up all sorts of possibilities for online development/scripting applications.

Live Demo and Free Evaluation

We have a live demo that you can run if you have Silverlight 4 installed.  It showcases the controls:

• Run the Live Demo

We encourage you to download a free evaluation of the suite and try it out in Visual Studio 2010 or Blend.  Note that if you use VS 2010, you must have the Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 installed from Microsoft.

• Download a Free Evaluation

Moving Forward

Once you get a chance to check out the new products, please send us some feedback.  We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Have fun coding!

Today we released our closed beta of Silverlight Studio to a private group of testers.  For more information on Silverlight Studio or how to become a tester, please read our last blog post.

We’re very close now to having a Silverlight Studio closed beta test ready to go, probably in the next several days!

Here’s a screenshot taken yesterday:

Some things to note… Silverlight Studio comes with complete menu/menuitem/contextmenu set of controls, a toolbar control, and custom styles for buttons.  Not only that but they come in the default Aero theme, along with the 3 Office 2010 themes.  We even have a ThemeManager that lets you switch these themes dynamically at run-time.

Closed beta test

We’re currently working on the deployment scripts and finishing up some final items before the first closed beta test is ready.  We expect this to be ready in the next several days.

This first beta will be a closed beta test, meaning that you will have to sign up to participate.  Note that documentation topics will likely not be available in this first beta test, however there will be a complete set of samples and much of the WPF Studio documentation on similar products applies to Silverlight Studio products.

While the closed beta test is going on, we will be finalizing things such as documentation, designer functionality, etc., in preparation for a public beta release.

Signing up for the closed beta test

If you are interested in participating in the closed beta test, please email our sales address with:

• Your name and e-mail address
• Company
• Which other Actipro products you own
• What interests you most about Silverlight Studio
• What you plan to do with Silverlight Studio products
• Which other products you’d like to see implemented in Silverlight (in priority order)

Please only sign up if you are willing to use the products immediately and provide constructive feedback.

Thanks and we look forward to hearing from you!

We have been working very hard on finishing up our upcoming Actipro Silverlight Studio suite over the past several months.  I wanted to share a screenshot of where it’s at and give some status updates.

SyntaxEditor for Silverlight

The biggest part of Silverlight Studio is SyntaxEditor for Silverlight.   It is a port of our popular SyntaxEditor for WPF control, which is an extremely powerful and customizable code editing control similar to the VS 2010 code editor.

Once this control is out, you will have the ability to create online IDEs, since you’ll have a syntax-highlighting editor control that will work in any browser that supports Silverlight and has advanced features like code outlining, custom adornments (squiggles, inline images, etc.), parsing, and much more. 

I just opened a 2MB C# file from my hard drive and it opened immediately, ready for editing, and with full syntax highlighting active.

SyntaxEditor for Silverlight is very near code complete for its first release now.  We tackled the biggest open remaining issues this week.  There are just a few minor things left to do.

As you can see from the screenshot, the very first version will ship with over 40 individual samples for SyntaxEditor alone.

Views for Silverlight

Silverlight Studio will also ship with Views for Silverlight, which is a port of our Views for WPF product.  Views includes a number of panels that make it easy to create fluid animations of child elements, along with a new ZapPanel control, and some more new panels on the way soon.

Views for Silverlight is all ready to go for the Silverlight Studio launch.

Shared Library

Our Silverlight Shared Library has some helpful controls built into it such as a fully working Menu, MenuItem, and ContextMenu setup.  It also has a port of our transition controls that are found in WPF Studio.  We’ll talk more about these and more soon.

What’s left to do?

We are currently working on a last couple minor features for SyntaxEditor.  Then we need to finish some of the intro documents and feature lists for the products.  Once we have our deployment code written, we will post a live demo of Silverlight Studio on our site so that you can try it out.

We will likely then open up closed beta testing to customers who contact us.  During that testing period we’ll be working on documentation, web site pages, and doing some other finishing touches.

Summary

We’re really excited about this upcoming products, and based on our customer feedback, you are too.  It won’t be long now before we can post something on our site for you to try.  Keep an eye on our blog as we’ll post here as more information becomes available.

Build 506 of WPF Studio 2009.1 is available for download now.  It is one of the larger WPF Studio maintenance releases we’ve made.  Let me do a quick review of some of the major exciting new features.  In addition to this list, there are a lot of other minor enhancements made.

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

	Docking/MDI for WPF Custom content in docking window tabs Any content can now be placed in docking window tabs.  This screenshot shows an animated progress indicator in one tab and a drop-down button in the other tab. Resize slots in a SplitContainer New features have been added making it possible for you to resize the slots of a SplitContainer however you like.  This screenshot shows a split container with an even distribution of space for its slots. Cascade and tile tabbed MDI documents You now can cascade, tile horizontally, and tile vertically tabbed MDI documents.  This screenshot shows how six tabbed documents are tiled horizontally. New WindowControl features WindowControl has several new options and even allows custom content to be in the title bar.  This screenshot shows a small progressbar in the title bar. Close tabs with middle-click An option has been added to allow tabs to close with a middle-click, much like in some popular browsers.
	Editors for WPF Improved min/maximum value support The built-in editors have had support for min/max values improved.
	Navigation for WPF New Windows 7-like expander style A new style has been added that renders similar to the Windows 7 expanders and even has smooth animation.  The style is customized for each system and Office theme. Built-in expander styles updated to support all expand directions We’ve updated all our built-in expander styles so that all expand directions are supported: up, down, left and right.
	PropertyGrid for WPF New textbox and dialog button property editor We’ve added a new built-in property editor that uses a TextBox and includes a button that can be used to show a dialog.
	SyntaxEditor for WPF Finalized language definition format This build finalizes the new language project and language definition XML formats.  All language samples have been updated to use them instead of the classic SyntaxEditor 4.0 for WinForms dynamic language XML definition format. Language Designer application Very major improvements (several weeks of dev time) have been made to the Language Designer application.  It has a number of helpful tools for quickly getting started building a syntax language for use with SyntaxEditor.  It now just takes a few minutes to get up and running, even for SyntaxEditor newbies. Automated quick info session processing We’ve added a new quick info provider service that can be added to a language.  This service watches for mouse hovers and just asks you what to display in response to hovers over different areas of the editor.  Quick info can be displayed for hovers over the text area, or any other part of the editor such as in margins. View mouse hover event A new view mouse hover event has been added.  We handle all the processing for determining when to fire it. Caret and selection brush customization You now can completely customize the look of the caret and selection.  Don’t like our default settings?  Change them however you like! Completion list display when user starts typing a word We’ve added a new feature to make it easy to know if the user is starting to type a new word, so that a completion list can display in response. MGrammar tokens now get assigned a token key We’ve updated tokens generated from the Oslo Dataflow Add-on to provide an IToken.Key value if a TokenKey attribute is specified in the original MGrammar source
	Shared Library for WPF Unique tooltip for PopupButton popup indicator We’ve added a new PopupIndicatorToolTip property to PopupButton, which allows the popup indicator to display a unique tooltip, rather than the tooltip for the main button area.

The next maintenance release of WPF Studio will include some new functionality that allows HLSL-based pixel shader effects to be used with any of our WPF products that use transitions, including Wizard, Docking/MDI, NavigationBar, and more.

Shader effects are a new feature in .NET 3.5 SP1 and can help make a lot more complex transitions than what can be created with standard WPF-based transitions.  More...

We are nearly finished with work on a new MonthCalendar control, which will be included with Editors for WPF. This version offers several features not found in the existing MonthCalendar found in the Shared Library, such as multiple selection and the ability to zoom out/in to navigate to different months, years, or decades.  More...

Build 4.5.0484 of WPF Studio added some very nice enhancements to the RadioButtonList control, which I’ll describe below.

The RadioButtonList is essentially a ListBox that has been templated so that its items appear like radio buttons.  The selected item in the RadioButtonList has its related radio button circle checked.

Bullet vertical alignment and margin

Two new properties have been added to RadioButtonList to allow for more complex layout of the bullets relative to each item’s content.

By default bullets are aligned center and just have a small right side margin to provide space between the bullet and the content.  Now you have the ability to set the vertical alignment of the bullets to top or bottom as well.  By using the related bullet margin property, you can tweak the margin around the bullet so that it aligns vertically with the content.

In the screenshot above, the bullets are aligned to the top and a small margin is set to ensure that the bullets line up with the bold header portion of each item’s content. 

Auto-disabling of non-selected item content

Another new feature added to RadioButtonList is an option to automatically disable the content of items that are not currently selected.

This feature is better explained in screenshots.  In the screenshot above, there is a RadioButtonList with two items.  The second item has a Button in its content.  Note that since the first item is currently selected, the Button has been disabled per this new feature.

In the next screenshot, the end user has selected the second item in the RadioButtonList, and therefore the Select button enables.

These new properties make it really easy to create some nice looking radio button lists with complex content.  Enjoy!