We noticed this morning that FeedBurner hasn’t been publishing our blog posts in the RSS feed for the last couple weeks.  The problem appears to be that our discussions on the new grammar framework were very long and created a feed size larger than 512KB.  At that threshold, FeedBurner stops publishing the blog.  This is good to know for anyone out there who uses FeedBurner.  We resolved the issue by temporarily reducing the number of items in the feed.

Make sure you click on over to our http://blog.actiprosoftware.com and take a look at the posts we’ve made recently that may not have shown up in your RSS feed.

Here’s a quick list of recent posts that you may have missed:

• SyntaxEditor grammar/AST framework part 1: Overview
• SyntaxEditor grammar/AST framework part 2: Introduction to symbols and EBNF terms
• SyntaxEditor grammar/AST framework part 3: Creating a grammar for the Simple language
• SyntaxEditor grammar/AST framework part 4: Introduction to customizing tree construction
• SyntaxEditor grammar/AST framework part 5: Optimizing the Simple grammar’s AST output
• SyntaxEditor grammar/AST framework part 6: Introduction to callbacks and error handling
• SyntaxEditor grammar/AST framework part 7: Adding error handling to the Simple grammar
• Silverlight Studio 2010.1 build 102 released
• SyntaxEditor grammar/AST framework part 8: Grammar debugger preview
• SyntaxEditor for WPF - HTML editor sample preview using Web Languages Add-on

We’ve just sent out our July 2010 newsletter to subscribers and have posted it online as well in case you are not a subscriber.

You can view the newsletter online via this link:

• View newsletter

We list our development plan for the next several months at the end of the newsletter in its What’s next? section.

What we accomplished

In Quarter 2 of 2010 we had several major product releases. 

WPF Studio 2010.1 was launched, which added the new Views for WPF product, made numerous enhancements to various WPF control products, updated all products to target .NET 3.5 SP1, and added Visual Studio 2010 integration. 

Silverlight Studio, our new bundle of controls for the Silverlight 4 platform, was also launched.  It contains ports of our popular SyntaxEditor code editor control and the new Views for WPF product, along with other useful controls and components found in its Shared Library.

Finally, we relaunched WPFpedia.com, our 100% free community resource guide for WPF developers.  It is written using the latest web technologies and allows you to easily find information on nearly any WPF development-related topic on the web.

What’s coming next

Now that we are past the Silverlight Studio release, we’re jumping back on adding new features and enhancements to our existing WPF products for a while.  We have a lot of updates planned over the coming weeks so stay tuned to our blog for details.

For a high-level list of what we’ll be working on, please see the July 2010 newsletter that will be posted shortly.

Blog post list

Here is a quick categorized list of useful blog postings made in this quarter.  More...

Last week we published our brand-new design for our WPF reference guide site called WPFpedia.  Today I’d like to do an introduction on how to use the home page of the resource guide to examine resources.

This screen shows the main home page of WPFpedia.  There is a Resource List on the left and a quick Search sidebar on the right.  Let’s examine what you can do with each one.

The Resource List

The Resource List is a quick list that defaults to showing the most recent resource items.

Each item shows:

• Number of votes
• Post date
• Number of views
• Special adornments such as admin favorites
• Title
• Summary description
• Source hostname
• Number of comments
• Tags

Voting

Under the vote count indicator, a plus button allows logged-in users to vote for the resource item.  This tells other users that you think the resource item is helpful and also allows you to easily find it again from your profile page.

Viewing a resource

To view a resource, click on the resource’s title.

Searching by tag

Any of the tags can be clicked to automatically search the resource guide by that tag.  This same concept applies anywhere tags are listed on the site.

Sorting the list

The Resource List can be sorted mutiple ways:

• Newest – The newest moderated resources appear first
• Most-viewed – The resources with the highest view counts appear first
• Most-votes – The resources with the most votes appear first
• Upcoming – New resources that have been submitted by users but have not yet been approved appear here
• Random – Resources are listed completely randomly, which is a great way to discover some interesting resources you wouldn’t normally look for

The Search pane

While the Resource List allows you to page through resources using one of the sorting methods, sometimes you may be looking for specific information.  After all, this is a resource guide where searching is its main function! :)

The Search pane, located on the right side of the home page, allows for complete searching of the resource guide.

Searching using a query

You can type text in the query box marked Enter search text and press the Search button to find the results the most closely match your query.

Searching by tag

As mentioned above, you can click any tag to automatically search the resource guide by that tag.  All resource items that are tagged with the search tag will be returned in a list.

The tags listed in the Search pane use varying font sizes.  The larger the font, the more resource items are in the guide that use that tag.

Summary

I hope this summary gives you the information needed to start using the guide effectively.  In follow-up blog posts well examine some other pieces of the site.

Jump over to WPFpedia now to start using it.

We’re very happy to announce that our WPFpedia.com site redesign has just been published and is now live!  Here’s a screenshot:

Take it for a spin now at:  www.wpfpedia.com

What is WPFpedia?

WPFpedia is a free reference guide we created for WPF developers.  There are a ton of useful resources on WPF development out on the web but finding them can be tricky.  Our reference guide site provides a one-stop shop way to access WPF development resources.

However it’s not just another link site.  All our content is completely moderated meaning we only list resource items that would truly be helpful to developers.  We tag all items and you can easily search by tag if you wish, or even filter search results by multiple tags.  We provide summaries of each resource item and even provide summaries of the source web sites.

Once you create a free account, you can vote on resource items you like and can add comments to them as well.  You can suggest your own resource items too.

We have backend logic that watches the web for interesting blog posts that could be useful to WPF developers.  Once found, we can read each one and determine whether it should be added to the resource guide or not.

About the design

We’ve tried our best to create a design that isn’t cluttered and really allows you to focus on the content of each page.  There is a minimal amount of advertising as well, currently one banner ad on each page.  We did this so as not to distract you from the content you are trying to find since this is first and foremost, our contribution back to the community.

Use case example

Say I’m a WPF developer (which I am :) ) and I have been directed by my manager to use MVVM in our new WPF application.  I can log onto wpfpedia.com and click the MVVM tag link on the search page.  This will provide me with a list of all the MVVM-related blog posts that have been loaded into the guide.  I can examine the details of each resource item and if it looks interesting to me, jump directly to it.

The old WPFpedia site

Our first iteration of WPFpedia was hosted inline with our main Actipro web site under the support section.  With this new redesign we wanted to move it out into its own site that is completely focused on delivering resource content to its viewers.

More information

I invite you to check the site out, sign up for a free account, and start voting and commenting on resource items you like.  Please use the Contact form on the site if you have any suggestions for further improvement as well.

Over the coming days, I’ll expand on some more capabilities of the site. 

Then following that I’ll start posting some screenshots of the work we’re doing on our upcoming Silverlight controls as we prepare Silverlight Studio.

What we accomplished

In Quarter 1 of 2010 we added some very major new features to SyntaxEditor for WPF: complete code outlining support, hidden regions, intra-text adornments, and IME support.  Navigation for WPF saw the addition of a ZoomContentControl, which allows you to scroll through large content easily.

We added designer support, item templates, and toolbox integration for our products in Visual Studio 2010.

What’s coming next

We have been a little quieter on the blog the past couple months but that’s because we’ve been hard at work trying to prep WPF Studio 2010.1 so that it’s ready to go the week of Visual Studio 2010’s release in mid-April.  WPF Studio 2010.1 will be moving to target .NET 3.5 SP1 and we will be including sample projects in VS 2010 format, optionally with VS 2008 format as well.

We have some big updates to our existing products, some of which we’ll give some more info on as we get closer to launch.

We are going to be launching a new WPF control product with WPF Studio 2010.1 too.

We also have been building up our product infrastructure for a Silverlight Studio 2010.1 bundle.  This has taken a while but we are plugging through it and hope to get a public beta out in the May timeframe.  The first version will include SyntaxEditor for Silverlight and a Silverlight version of the unnamed new product.

Finally, we are very close to having a re-launch of our wpfpedia.com WPF resource guide site ready.  We’re really excited about it and we think you will be too when you get to see and use it.  The new design is very “web 2.0”.

Keep an eye on our blog for more details on all of the above.

Blog post list

Here is a quick categorized list of blog postings made in this quarter.  More...

Actipro Software consists of an elite, fun team of software developers who love building user interface controls for our customers.  We're looking for young, energetic WPF and/or Silverlight software developers to join our development team, working directly on our product offerings such as WPF Studio!

This is a full-time position, although we could accommodate a part-time position as well.

If you are interested, please read on to get a feel for whether your skill set would be a match.  Or if you know others who may be interested in this sort of position, please forward the information on.

Responsibilities

The responsibilities involved in this position will be diverse, and we’re happy to tailor the responsibilities to your strengths.  In general though, this is what the position entails:

• Designing and implementing new UI control products for the WPF and Silverlight platforms.
• Enhancing existing Actipro control products.
• Porting existing Actipro WPF control products to Silverlight.
• Interacting with customers in a support capacity.

Benefits

The benefits of joining our Actipro team are:

• Being part of a highly-motivated group of developers who have passion for what they do.
• Be on the cutting edge of Microsoft technology, with a company who is a Visual Studio partner.
• Build great software components that are used in thousands of companies and make a difference in the industry.
• Work remotely from home.
• Flexible hours.

Qualifications

We are only looking at candidates who possess these required qualifications:

• A US citizen who lives in the US.
• Several months of experience developing C# WPF and/or Silverlight projects, and a solid understanding of the framework.
• Able to work independently with little supervision.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Somewhat familiar with Actipro products.
• Must not (or plan to) be working for any competitor of Actipro, or any other company that would cause a conflict of interest with Actipro.

We have extra interest in candidates who have these additional qualifications:

• An ambitious drive to come up with and present new ideas.
• Prior control development and/or architecture experience.
• A team-friendly, fun personality.
• Graphics and design skills.
• Attention to detail.
• A good eye for UI.
• A community contributor for WPF/Silverlight technology.

How to apply

If you are interested in joining our team, please visit our Employment Opportunities page and click the Apply Now button at the bottom of the page.

http://www.actiprosoftware.com/Company/Jobs.aspx

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.

What we accomplished

In Quarter 4 of 2009 we mostly focused on getting the WPF Studio 2009.2 release out. 

SyntaxEditor for WPF saw major updates to the Language Designer application, along with a ton of new features including tagging, adornments, squiggle lines, and much more.

Some screens and video showing the future SyntaxEditor for Silverlight control were made available.  This control shares most of the same framework as the WPF version of SyntaxEditor.

Docking/MDI for WPF added floating document support similar to the functionality found in Visual Studio 2010.  All floating windows can now be maximized and custom chromes can be used for rendering the window border/titlebars.

Editors for WPF added a new AnalogClock controls, and used this new clock on the DateTimeEditBox dropdown when appropriate.  A new editbox and a list control were added to support easy end user editing of enumeration values.

Navigation for WPF added a new ZoomContentControl that provides an intuitive interface for scrolling/zooming any large content, such as maps, pictures, reports, etc.

Ribbon for WPF added support for multi-row in-ribbon galleries.

All WPF controls received VS 2010 and Blend 3 designer support.

The SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on for WinForms added C# 4.0 and VB 10.0 parsing support.

What’s coming next

In the coming months, we plan on expanding our product line, getting more into the Silverlight realm, and updating Ribbon to use newer Office 2010 features.

Newsletters

The December 2009 newsletter gave an overview of the WPF Studio 2009.2 release along with other recent updates and future plans.

Blog post list

Here is a quick categorized list of blog postings made in this quarter.  More...

What we accomplished

In Quarter 3 of 2009 we focused on adding some significant value to our existing products while adding some new DataGrid support.

SyntaxEditor for WPF saw the implementation of the multi-threaded syntactic/semantic parsing framework, integration with ANTLR parsers via a new add-on, AST construction and error reporting features for the MGrammar add-on, and robust hit testing.

DataGrid for WPF was introduced as a new free product for our customers.  It is a couple of add-ons that provide behavior extensions, new themes, and Editors for WPF integration with the open source Microsoft WPF DataGrid control.

Docking/MDI for WPF added tab tinting, standard MDI window icons, and magnetism features.

What’s coming next

Right now we’re doing some very major enhancements to the SyntaxEditor Language Designer tool, so that it will be very easy to create language definitions used by SyntaxEditor for WPF.  Once these enhancements are complete and documented, we’ll publish what will probably be the final WPF Studio 2009.1 maintenance release.  More information will be posted soon on the updates we’re doing.

Following the final 2009.1 release, we will be working on some big updates for a WPF Studio 2009.2 version that shouldn’t be too far behind.  One cornerstone feature of 2009.2 will be floating documents like those found in VS 2010.  We have some other surprises planned as well.

Blog post list

Here is a quick categorized list of blog postings made in this quarter.  More...