Sunday I'll be getting on a plane to Los Angeles to represent Actipro at this year's Microsoft PDC convention.  Sorry but Actipro won't be having a booth this year.  Instead, I will be focused on being a sponge and picking up information on all the cutting-edge technology coming down the road.  :)

My schedule will primarily focus on the WPF, Silverlight, Visual Studio, and future .NET language enhancement sessions.  I'm really looking forward to seeing what is in development for future releases of WPF and Silverlight.

I'm sure many of our valued Actipro customers will be in attendance at these sessions as well so if you happen to see me around, please feel free to introduce yourself and say hi.  I'll be bumming around with my good friend Eric Smith of Codesmith Tools.  Also feel free to email our sales address (which I will probably continue to monitor) if you'd like to meet up somewhere, and we'll see what we can do.

See you there and enjoy the show!

Bill Henning

We're looking to add a part-time consultant to our innovative WPF development team at Actipro.  If you are a young software developer who feels you can make a difference and want to be involved in the creation of top-notch WPF user interface controls then we want to hear from you.

Benefits of working for Actipro are that you can work from home, have flexible hours, get mentored by our staff, and learn about all aspects of product development.

Best of all, while we would start out with some simpler tasks, the end goal would be to migrate you towards enhancing our existing control products or creating your own.  This role would bring increased pay and responsibilities.

Interested?  Click the link below to learn more, and tell us about yourself and where you want to go.

Learn more about our job opening

We only want to hear from individual candidates who are US citizens. Recruiters and other firms who contact us will not be considered.

As a more formal follow-up to this post where a lot of our valued customers gave their feedback on our product roadmap, we just began a new poll to get more input from our customers on exactly which types of WPF products you'd like to see us bring to market.  Now that PropertyGrid for WPF is almost ready to go, our next project will be an Editors library with things like part-based and masked textbox editing.  These will be able to be used with PropertyGrid or standalone.  As you know we also have SyntaxEditor for WPF in ongoing development.

You can find the new poll here:

Poll: Which WPF products do you want to see Actipro bring to market?

Please take a minute to fill it out and rank the various future product ideas we have.  At Actipro, your input matters!

Previous Poll Results

Our previous poll "What IDEs do you use for WPF design/development?" has been out for a while now and we found the results thus far to be in line with what we expected.

95% said they used Visual Studio 2008 for WPF development.  5% said they still used VS 2005 and 5% said they used neither.

10% said they used Expression Blend all the time.  53% said they used it occasionally, while 37% said they do not use it at all.

As part of continuing efforts to improve the quality of service to our customers, we've made some very major enhancements to our Organization Purchases page.  The updates are based on customer feedback along with our own ideas.  We're confident you're really going to love them!

I'd like to walk through the new interface to show you the improved features.

Streamlined, Cleaner Design

You can see from the screenshot above that the new Organization Purchases page for our customers is drastically different from before.  Each product/version group is now separated by a bold heading and an image for the product. 

Right next to the image are action links for doing things like downloading the latest maintenance release, e-mailing yourself the license key, or purchasing upgrades and additional licenses.

Below the lines is information describing your free upgrade information based on what subscriptions you own, if any.

Finally, the details of the individual purchases you've made for the product/version are listed.

Filtering

There now are several options for filtering the purchased product list.  A message is shown above the list when at least one product/version is filtered out per the criteria settings.

Platform is a drop-down that lets you select specific platforms only, such as WPF or WinForms.

Latest-owned versions only will only show product/versions that are the latest you own.  For instance if you own SyntaxEditor v4.0, v3.1, and v3.0, when this box is checked, you will only see v4.0 listed. 

Show details will display all the individual purchase details for the displayed product/versions.  By unchecking this box, you hide the grid with header "Date", "Description", "Licenses" in the screenshot above.

Jumping to a Product

Links appear below the filtering criteria that let you jump directly to specific products in your purchased products list.

Product Alerts

The product alerts section is a new concept for this page and probably is the best new feature that was added in the update.  It provides a task list of action items that you can do related to your purchases.

It currently shows three types of alerts:

1. Free upgrade alerts - When you have an active subscription for a product and a new version is available, this alert will tell you to click on the link to request a free upgrade.
2. Expiring license/subscription alerts - When you are nearing the expiration date of a license/subscription, this type of alert tells you the expiration date and allows you to jump directly to the related product purchase page to order a renewal.
3. New version alerts - When you don't have an active subscription and a new version is available, this alert notifies you of the new version and provides a link directly to the related product purchase page to order an upgrade.

We sincerely hope our customers like the updates.  They will be especially useful for our larger customers who have made many purchases over the year.

Please e-mail us if you have any problems with the updated page.

At Actipro we are always striving to improve IDE and designer support for our WPF control products. 

Now that Visual Studio 2008 has been out for some time with formal WPF support, we wanted to poll our user community to see if anyone is still using Visual Studio 2005 for development, or if everyone has basically moved onto Visual Studio 2008 for their development needs.

Our WPF control products currently install a sample project for VS 2005, however if nobody is using that version any more, we would like to migrate completely to Visual Studio 2008 projects only.

If you are a WPF application developer, please help guide our future WPF IDE support by answering a quick poll here:

Poll:  What IDEs do you use for WPF design/development?

It will only take a minute of your time... we appreciate the feedback!

Welcome to the Actipro Blog, the place where we will be posting insider information on anything related to Actipro Software products including upcoming products, features, tips and tricks, etc.  We also will be posting general WPF and Windows Forms news that is useful for the masses.

Stay tuned for some big updates coming soon!