We’re currently hard at work on WPF Studio 2010.1, which we hope to launch in the next couple months.  We plan on it including a number of enhancements to existing products along with a brand new unannounced product.

Now that .NET 4.0 is almost upon us with the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2010, we have made a change to the minimum requirements for our products.  Right now in WPF Studio 2009.2 our products target .NET 3.0, but starting with WPF Studio 2010.1 we will be targeting .NET 3.5 SP1.

This of course means that your apps that will use WPF Studio 2010.1 products will require .NET 3.5 SP1 or later so please plan accordingly.  If you must keep a .NET 3.0 or 3.5 (non-SP1) minimum requirement in effect, then stick with WPF Studio 2009.2 until you are able to move to .NET 3.5 SP1.

Based on our poll data, nearly everyone who has responded is already on .NET 3.5 SP1 or is planning on moving to it shortly, so hopefully this will not be an issue for anyone.

The most recent release of WPF Studio, 2009.2 build 515, added complete IME editing support to the SyntaxEditor control.  This has been a highly requested feature item so we’re pleased to introduce it.

What is IME?

The input method editor (IME) is a Window feature that allows users to enter characters and symbols not found on their input device.  For instance, it allows Western keyboards to enter Chinese, Japanese, etc. characters.

Unfortunately WPF’s support of IME is spotty, and it only is supported in TextBoxBase controls.  Since SyntaxEditor doesn’t inherit TextBoxBase (we need to track text on our own), the only way to add it was via Windows API calls.  Thus while the IME input features will now work by default in Windows apps, they will not work in XBAPs because of security.

IME in action

Here’s a sample of how it works.  We have started up our demo application and in the Windows language bar, enabled Japanese Hiragana input.

At the cursor we’ll type the A key on our Western keyboard.

A small popup appears that “looks” like it’s inline with the code editor.  A Japanese glyph is displayed.  If we accept the glyph we can press Enter to insert it.  We could type other characters to make different glyphs or enter a number of glyphs at one time.

To end this demo, we have pressed Enter and the glyph has been inserted into our code editor.

Summary

Now that SyntaxEditor has full support for IME and bi-di text, it is an ideal editor control for use in any global application.

The ZoomContentControl is a control we added to our Navigation for WPF product with the WPF Studio 2009.2 release.  It makes it easy for an end user to scroll through any sort of large content.

WPF Studio 2009.2 build 515 (released this week) adds support for overlays, which are elements you add to layer on top of the content.  When the content is scrolled or scaled, the overlays move accordingly but do not scale themselves.

In this QuickStart that ships with the product as of build 515, we show a vector map of the United States.  We can add a pin to the map by clicking on the map.

In this screenshot, I clicked to add a pin by Cleveland, OH.  Let’s zoom in and scroll a bit to see what happens…  More...

We’ve just made the WPF Studio 2009.2 build 515 maintenance release available.  This maintenance release includes some new features and bug fixes.  Notable new features include ZoomContentControl overlays and SyntaxEditor IME input support.

We’ll describe these in more detail in upcoming posts.  In the meantime, check out the detailed list of updates.

Download the WPF Studio evaluation now or if you are a customer, grab the new release from your account.

We’ve been continuing to develop the Silverlight version of our SyntaxEditor control, which is a syntax-highlighting code editor control similar to the VS 2010 editor. 

We recently completed code outlining (folding) features in our WPF SyntaxEditor control and just finished porting those same features over to the Silverlight codebase as well.

Check the above video out… it shows SyntaxEditor for Silverlight’s run-time code outlining features in action.

Stay tuned to our blog for more information on SyntaxEditor for Silverlight as its development continues.

In the last blog post we discussed how to hide text regions without using the code outlining feature in SyntaxEditor for WPF.  Today I’d like to show how you can replace the collapsed text regions with an intra-text adornment.

Here is a another open source QuickStart that ships with SyntaxEditor.  In the editor, I will select some text and then press the Collapse Selected Text button at the top.

Similar to our last QuickStart, the text that was selected was hidden.  The difference is that here, we have reserved some space in-line with the text and rendered a custom adornment in that space.  The custom adornment could be anything, even a control.  For this QuickStart, we made it look like a standard collapsed text adornment.  More...

One of the recently added features of SyntaxEditor for WPF is the ability to hide a region of text independently of the code outlining feature.

Here is an open-source QuickStart (included with the SyntaxEditor samples) that shows the behavior I’m describing.  In this QuickStart we have an editable SyntaxEditor on top and a read-only SyntaxEditor on the bottom that binds to the text of the editable SyntaxEditor.  There is also a button above both that lets us collapse (hide) selected text.

In the screenshot, I’ve selected Actipro. and will now click the Collapse Selected Text button.  What this does is tag the selection’s text range using an ICollapsedRegionTag.  SyntaxEditor knows to watch for that tag and when it finds an instance, its text formatting engine collapses (hides) the tagged text range.  More...

We just published WPF Studio 2009.2 build 514 and some of its new features are the culmination of over a month of work on the SyntaxEditor product.  We’ve mentioned some of the new feature areas in our previous blog posts, but here is the list again:

• Collapsed text
• Intra-text spacers and intra-text adornment managers
• Code outlining

Build 514 includes 7 new samples specifically related to the features mentioned above.  That brings our grand total to over 60 samples just for the SyntaxEditor product!

Our last blog post focused on a QuickStart included with build 514 that showed how to implement code reviewing right within the editor, via the use of intra-text adornments.  Today I’d like to discuss code outlining.

What is code outlining?

Code outlining, also known as code folding, is the ability for an outlining node hierarchy to be constructed based on the contents of the document.  The outlining node hierarchy is rendered visually within the new outlining margin as seen in the screenshot below:

A “+” or “-“ box in the margin shows where nodes start.  Clicking those boxes toggles the collapsed state of the node.  When a node is collapsed, its text is hidden and boxed-in collapsed text adornment is rendered in place of the hidden text.  In the screenshot above, the boxed-in “/**/” is a collapsed multi-line comment node.  More...

As mentioned in our previous blog post, we’ve been hard at work on some very major new features for the WPF SyntaxEditor control, the premier code editor control for Windows Presentation Foundation.  The three areas we’re about code complete with are:

• Collapsed text
• Intra-text spacers and intra-text adornment managers
• Code outlining

Note that the code in the current build 513 has portions of the above already implemented but the next build 514 is where we hope to have the object model about finalized.  We hope to have some samples and documentation for that build too.

Today I wanted to provide a sneak peek for a full source QuickStart that will be included in the next build 514 of WPF Studio.  This is a really neat QuickStart so prepare for a bunch of screenshots!

Code Reviewing QuickStart in action

This QuickStart is intended to show one way you could do code reviews within an app.  SyntaxEditor is the code editor control in use here.  Assume we have some code loaded from another developer and need to review it.  As we review, we’ll mark some sections of code to come back to later.

In the screenshot above, I as the reviewer determined that the namespace was incorrect.  So I selected the namespace name in the code editor, typed “The namespace is incorrect” in the textbox at the very top and clicked the Add note button.  Poof!  A note appeared in-line with the text.  Notice that the range I selected is now rendered with a yellow background.  But the really cool thing is that there’s also a note icon with drop-down arrow inside the text, between characters.  Is that a real control?  More...

We’ve just made the WPF Studio 2009.2 build 512 maintenance release available.  This maintenance release focuses on various bug fixes, but we’ve also made some significant updates to SyntaxEditor for WPF, mostly under the hood.

SyntaxEditor for WPF work-in-progress features

SyntaxEditor should now perform much better when using custom classification taggers. 

We also have started laying the framework pieces needed to support code outlining (folding).  The three main components of this are collapsed text, intra-text spacing/adornments, and an outlining manager.  Note that these components are work-in-progress, may still change, and currently are undocumented.

Collapsed text refers to the ability to “hide” a region of text so that the caret skips right over it.

Intra-text spacing means being able to insert custom-sized spacers in between certain text characters.  Then you can render custom adornments in those spaces.  This feature allows you to insert images or other content (even controls) right in the document.

Let’s take a look at a sample we’re developing to be released once these features are all complete:

Here we use one tag to collapse a region of text, another tag to reserve some space in its place, and an adornment manager to render the “…” box in that space.

The third component to code outlining is an outlining manager, which is what we’re working on right now.  The outlining manager will help drive the other features to provide a result like above.

The neat thing about our design is that you can use collapsed regions and intra-text spacing/adornment features independent of outlining.  This opens up some interesting possibilities.

Look for blog posts in the future discussing these features in more detail once we make some more progress on the outlining manager.  And again, please note that they are currently undocumented.  We’ll document them and provide samples once they have been finalized.