The Actipro Blog

In a recent blog post, we mentioned that WinForms product updates were in progress.  I'd like to get into some more detail on what is to be expected from these updates.

Update Overview

Creation of WinForms Studio 2012.1

The next major WinForms controls release that we are working on restructures the WinForms control products to be similar to our WPF controls.  There will be a new WinForms Studio suite option that provides discounts over purchasing controls individually. 

UIStudio is being split up into three individual products:  Bars, Docking/MDI, and Navigation.  All of these separate products will be available in the WinForms Studio suite or individually.

The WinUICore and Shared assemblies have been merged into a single Shared assembly.

Finally, all products will have the same version number, which for the first version will be 2012.1.

Migration to .NET 3.5 and VS 2010 Projects

We've wanted to migrate to VS 2010 projects for the source and samples for a while now.  WinForms Studio 2012.1 will feature source built from VS 2010 projects and samples available in VS 2010 and 2008.

.NET 3.5/4.0 Client Profile Support

A common feature request over the past couple years has been for us to decouple the control designer functionality from the product assemblies so that "client profile" setups in .NET 3.5 or 4.0 can be used.

For WinForms Studio 2012.1, we have removed references to System.Design.dll from the product assemblies and have moved all designer functionality out to separate Design assemblies instead.

Restructuring of Internal Processes

All of our WPF and Silverlight controls are managed, built, and deployed using the same sort of scripts and tools.  This allows us to share code and make updates much faster.

For a long time now we've wanted to get our older WinForms controls on the same configuration.  That way, our products for all three platforms can be maintained internally by us in the same fashion. 

To accomplish this, internally we have:

• Created a source code folder structure that closely mimics our WPF/Silverlight source code folder structures.
• Updated all product licensing to use the same mechanism found in WPF Studio.
• Created a new Sample Browser application that is used to browse all WinForms product samples and product release histories.
• Converted product documentation to use our newer documentation format and build tools used in WPF/Silverlight.
• Merged all product documentation into a single help file like in WPF/Silverlight
• Created a new build process based on the WPF Studio build process.
• Created a new installer based on the WPF Studio installer.
• Other more minor updates.

Beta Testers Wanted

We're excited to be getting the updates listed above completed and out into your hands.  We are already well on our way towards doing so.

I'd like to take this opportunity to ask for beta testers to work with the new version once a beta is ready.  We hope to have a beta ready some time in the next couple weeks.

Please write us if you are an existing WinForms control customer and would like to be a part of our beta test.

We'll post more soon!

Earlier this week we posted new builds of many products, including WPF Studio.  The latest WPF Studio build now has a new QuickStart that shows how easy the Themes portion of WPF Studio makes it to customize other products such as Docking/MDI.

The first release of WPF Studio 2011.2 made some visual updates to Docking/MDI that went with a more high-contrast look that focuses the user's eye on content, instead of the docking UI.  This look is similar to Visual Studio 2010 (Aero theme shown below):

We had a couple customers request an option to use the older lighter appearance that was present is past versions.  So for build 552 we added a QuickStart showing how easy it is to customize the entire look of the Docking/MDI product.  We provide full source lighter alternate Docking/MDI themes for Aero, Office Blue, and Office Silver in this QuickStart.

Here is the alternate theme for Aero:

The QuickStart demonstrates how you can wire up alternate themes to use and take effect whenever the app's theme is changed.  Download WPF Studio's latest build to see this new QuickStart in action.

We just published maintenance releases for all WPF and Silverlight controls, along with the WinForms SyntaxEditor and UIStudio products.

WPF Controls

The WPF Studio updates include numerous minor enhancements, tweaks, and bug fixes throughout nearly all the WPF controls.  It also has a brand new sample for Docking/MDI and Themes that shows how to completely provide an alternate look for the Docking/MDI product, one that is similar to our older lighter themes.  We'll showcase this in a future blog post.

The updates for the maintenance release are described in this announcement thread.

Silverlight Controls

The Silverlight Studio updates also include numerous minor enhancements, tweaks, and bug fixes throughout the various Silverlight controls, and are described in this announcement thread.

WinForms Controls

SyntaxEditor and the .NET Languages Add-on had several enhancements and bug fixes (described in this announcement thread).

UIStudio had several tweaks and bug fixes applied (described in this announcement thread).

In the WPF Studio 2011.2 build that was just released, we added resolver and IntelliPrompt support for anonymous types.  Now the add-on supports those features for extension methods, lambdas, and anonymous types.  All of those things are the building blocks for future LINQ IntelliPrompt!

Anonymous Type IntelliPrompt Examples

Let's see some examples of automated IntelliPrompt for anonymous types.

In this screenshot, we have implicitly declared a variable anon as an anonymous type.  The anonymous type's properties are initialized using a variable, and a couple assignment.  Hovering over anon to display quick info reveals anon as an anonymous type.  More...

WPF Studio 2011.2 build 551 has been released and is now available for download.

This maintenance release fixes a couple bugs introduced in the previous build related to WPF/WinForms interop so it is highly recommended as an immediate download if you use our WPF products in a WinForms app or use interop controls in Docking/MDI.

The SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on adds resolver and IntelliPrompt support for anonymous types.

Docking/MDI adds a highly-requested WindowStateChanged event, that is raised when a docking window's state has changed.

See the announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

We’re very pleased to announce that WPF Studio 2011.2 build 550 has been released and is now available for download.

This version has enormous updates for all products that unifies and improves how theming is done, and provides optional themes for native WPF controls that look great next to Actipro controls, thus facilitating consistent app-wide themes.  SyntaxEditor also has received numerous new highly-requested feature areas such as IntelliPrompt parameter info, single-line edit mode, code fragments, and drag and drop.

Major new features are described below. See the announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

Stunning App-Wide Themes

Actipro Themes includes professionally-designed themes that cover all system, Office themes, and high contrast mode. 

The themes apply to all Actipro controls and optionally to native WPF controls.  This ensures that no matter what combination of controls you use in your app, it will look great!  More...

This post continues our series on the Actipro Themes being added for all our WPF controls in the upcoming 2011.2 version.

The previous post covered the new common asset pool and how it helps us achieve a level of visual consistency throughout all our custom control products as well as WPF native controls that you won’t find elsewhere.

In today’s post, we’ll take a glimpse at the major visual facelift we’ve done on the Docking/MDI for WPF product for the 2011.2 version.

Goals

As seen in the first post of this series, Actipro Themes will include updated menu, toolbar, and statusbar appearances that were inspired by Visual Studio 2010’s look.  For the 2011.2 version, we wanted to extend this look to the Docking/MDI product as well since it is very often used with menus, toolbars, and statusbars.

The design of the VS 2010 is interesting in that it goes a bit more high contrast by using dark workspace colors to deemphasize the unimportant portions of the user interface.  It contrasts this by using light colors for the content area of each document and tool window.  There are fewer lines used for borders, which simplifies the appearance and reduces unnecessary distracting UI.

We’ve taken these concepts and ran with them for our Docking/MDI visual updates.

First Look

Here’s the first look at the new visual updates:

This screenshot shows the default Aero look.  Note how well it combines with our new theme updates for the native WPF menu and statusbar.  More...

Silverlight Studio 2011.2 is now released and available for download. This version adds significant new features to SyntaxEditor and its add-ons.

Major new features are described below. See the announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

More...

Another highly-requested feature, drag and drop, has been implemented and is ready to go in SyntaxEditor for WPF in the 2011.2 version.  This feature allows SyntaxEditor to drag and drop text within itself, or with external controls.

In today’s post, I’d like to show off another highly requested feature coming to SyntaxEditor for WPF/Silverlight in the 2011.2 version: code fragments!

What Are Code Fragments?

There are often cases where a customer wants to use our advanced C#/VB languages from the .NET Languages Add-on to allow the user to edit either a method body, or even simply an expression.  The problem is that for automated IntelliPrompt to continue working, there must be a valid containing class, member, etc.  In these scenarios though, the developer doesn’t generally want the end user to be able to see or edit those. 

Code fragments is a perfect solution for this scenario.  Documents now allow you to optionally set header and footer text.  When set, this text is prepended (header) and postpended (footer) to the document snapshot’s text when it is submitted to the language’s parser.

Here’s the new sample for this feature:

You can see that the middle editor is normally what an end user would see, just a set of C# statements.  However when the C# parser gets text from that editor to parse, it actually sees the concatenation of the header/fragment/footer text together, and builds an AST and reports syntax errors accordingly.  In the screenshot, there is a syntax error squiggle line after firstItem since it expects a close parenthesis.

In the screenshot above, I’ve displayed a completion list for the firstItem variable.  This variable was implicitly typed to be an int because its initializer came from the result of a LINQ method on a List<int>, which came in as a parameter from the containing method in the header text.

That’s really cool stuff!  With this feature you can now edit statements or an expression in an editor with full IntelliPrompt capabilities.  And this all will work seamlessly with any custom language too!

This new feature will be released as part of the 2011.2 version.