As of today’s releases of our Windows Forms products, we have dropped support for VS 2003 projects and .NET 1.1 builds of our component libraries.  At this point, VS 2008 has been out for some time and anyone doing Windows Forms development should be on .NET 2.0 or later.

The latest maintenance releases now have both Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2005 sample projects included.

All the component libraries are built targeting .NET 2.0.  Please note that libraries that target .NET 2.0, can be used in any later .NET framework as well, such as .NET 3.0 or 3.5.

Part of the large Actipro WPF Studio build 456 update was a number of new themes for our controls that match the "Royale" Windows system theme.

The Royale theme is a Media Center-like theme that was made available for Windows XP and generally looks more modern than the three standard Windows XP themes.

Now all our themed WPF products look great in the Royale system theme.  Let's take a peek at some of the major controls:

Actipro Ribbon for WPF

Actipro Docking & MDI for WPF

ExplorerBar and Breadcrumb (Part of Actipro Navigation for WPF)

NavigationBar (Part of Actipro Navigation for WPF)

Actipro Wizard for WPF

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.