The 2010.2 version of SyntaxEditor for WPF (and the same for the 2010.2 Silverlight Studio release) will get a new built-in language service called SquiggleTagQuickInfoProvider that you can register on your language.  When this service is registered and the mouse is moved over a squiggle, it checks the squiggle data to see if there is related content available that can be displayed in an IntelliPrompt popup.  If so, it displays it.  Here’s and example of quick info for a parse error:

In this sample, we’re using the Web Languages Add-on’s XML language.  The XML parser returned that there was a parse error because there is an unexpected duplicate end tag.  We already have a built-in tagger that automatically looks for parse errors from a parser and makes squiggle lines in the editor for them.  Now with this new quick info provider, mouse hovers over the squiggles will also show the text of the parse error.

If you have a parser on your language that is capable of returning parse errors, then it just takes two lines of code to register the parse error tagger (which renders the squiggles) and the new squiggle tag quick info provider, thereby giving you all this functionality.

As mentioned in one of our previous posts, we’ve been working on a port of our SyntaxEditor Web Languages Add-on from WinForms to the WPF version of SyntaxEditor.  We’re finishing up some last features on it before it will be ready to launch alongside WPF Studio 2010.2 in the coming weeks.

The advanced XML syntax language implementation in the add-on allows you to specify XML schemas to use for validation and to drive automated IntelliPrompt for the end user.  In the previous post on the subject we showed how to create an XHTML editor in a few lines of code with automated IntelliPrompt popups.

One feature we just implemented was the ability to properly support xs:any nodes defined in the XML schemas.  xs:any allows a schema to indicate that elements from any, other, or specific namespaces can be included as content within another element.

Best of all, we ported this new functionality back to the WinForms Web Languages Add-on too!

Let’s see an example…

Here is the WPF SyntaxEditor showing an XSLT document loaded.  The XSLT is doing a transform to HTML.  In the screenshot the mouse is over the xsl:value-of element, showing a quick info tip.  Now let’s start typing a new start tag…  More...

We’ve just published build 102 of Silverlight Studio.  Major updates include:

• A free Ruby language definition for SyntaxEditor
• SyntaxEditor Language Designer updates including token and lexical state ID generation for dynamic lexers
• Improvements to our WPF/Silverlight compatibility layer for dependency properties

Head over the announcement post for details of what’s new.

We’ve just released Silverlight Studio 2010.1 build 101.  We’ve got some great new features in this build.

ToolBar gets overflow and vertical orientation capabilities

As described in this previous post, the ToolBar control in our Shared Library has been updated to support overflow of controls to a popup and vertical orientation.

The screenshot above shows both features in action.

SyntaxEditor’s new EditorSearchView control

SyntaxEditor for WPF has a great control called EditorSearchView that you can drop into a window and instantly provide find/replace functionality to you end users.

With today’s release, now SyntaxEditor for Silverlight has it too.  You can quickly toggle between find and replace modes using our ToolBar control and all of the standard find/replace options are available to the end user.

SyntaxEditor adds a context menu

Finally, we’ve added a default context menu to SyntaxEditor for Silverlight to make it even more user-friendly.

The context menu has the standard editing options available.

Summary

The new build is live right now.  Check out the announcement post for change details.  Enjoy!

Our Silverlight Studio bundle contains a custom ToolBar control in the Shared Library, along with Menu and ContextMenu controls.

Here is how it looks in the default Aero theme, although the current official release doesn’t yet have the overflow button at the end.  That is a new feature that has been added for the next maintenance release.  Basically the overflow button is disabled unless there isn’t enough space to display all of the child controls.

In that case the overflow button can be clicked to display a popup that contains all of the child controls that weren’t able to fit on the main toolbar.  The Office black-themed screenshot above shows the overflow popup.

In addition, we’ve added vertical orientation capabilities as seen in the Office blue-themed screenshot above.  By setting the new Orientation property to Vertical, the toolbar renders vertically and even auto-rotates the background/border brushes and padding for you.

These new features will be in the next maintenance release of Silverlight Studio.

Yesterday we posted information on performance enhancements that have been made to PropertyGrid for WPF that will appear in the future WPF Studio 2010.2 version.  Today I’d like to show a new feature that has also been added for that version.

Overview

Nested categories, meaning categories within categories, are available when setting the new PropertyGrid.AreNestedCategoriesSupported property to true and can be used with either the SelectedObject(s) or Properties properties.

Nested categories are created by specifying the “path” to the desired category, versus the actual name. For example, using a category name of One\Two would create a root category titled One, which contains a nested category titled Two.

The screenshot above shows numerous nested categories within the PropertyGrid.

Levels

Any level of nested categories can be created, with each name separate by a backslash (\). If a backslash is required in any of the categories, that part can be wrapped in single or double quotes. For example, One\’Two\2’ would create a root category titled One, which contains a nested category titled Two\2.

Grouping

All properties and categories will be combined, based on their “path”. For example, if two properties both define a category of One\Two, then both properties will be located in the category titled Two. If one property defines a category of One\Two and another property defines a category of One, then the category titled One will contain the category titled Two and the latter property (and the former property will be contained in the category titled Two).

Summary

As mentioned above, these updates will be in the future WPF Studio 2010.2 version.

We’ve been hard at work on enhancements for our WPF controls that will be part of our WPF Studio 2010.2 version.  One of the areas we’ve gotten into is reworking a lot of the internals of our PropertyGrid control to improve performance.

PropertyGrid was already performing comparable to other WPF property grids, however we have taken a long look at several areas that we identified could provide some additional performance gains, and have updated our code to take advantage of the ideas.

Without getting into too much detail, we have focused on changes that would reduce the overall number of visuals and measure/arrange cycles that were required.

We also have added some options that further improve performance when set appropriately:

1. A ScrollViewer is used to provide the vertical scrolling (and show/hide the ScrollBar).  It causes extra measure/arrange cycles since it needs to determine if/when a ScrollBar should be displayed.  We now support the attached ScrollViewer.VerticalScrollBarVisibility property.  When set to Visible, the ScrollBar will always be visible however the extra measure/arrange cycles are removed.
2. A Thumb is used to allow the end user to resize the property grid’s columns.  A new AreDefaultColumnsResizable property has been added to turn off this feature.  When off, the load time required to arrange, measure, and apply templates is reduced.
3. Virtualization features have been improved such that scrolling a virtualized property grid is faster than before.

All of these features are complete for the WPF Studio 2010.2 version that should be released in the next couple months.

We’ve just released new SyntaxEditor for WinForms and UIStudio for WinForms maintenance releases the other day.  The new SyntaxEditor build has numerous functionality updates, adds three new sample languages (C, C++, and RTF), and improves the .NET Language Add-on’s automated IntelliPrompt in Visual Basic.  Enjoy!

We’ve just posted WPF Studio 2010.1 build 523, which contains a lot of minor updates, enhancements, and fixes for the various WPF products.

Most notably, we’ve updated our Oslo add-on for SyntaxEditor to support the latest ‘M’ Language Definitions (formerly called MGrammar) version.

For a complete list of what changed, please see this announcement post.

What’s next?

With the recent release of Silverlight Studio 2010.1, we are now back on track with major new WPF development.  We’ll post more on upcoming new features and enhancements in the coming weeks.  Our development plan is to work on PropertyGrid, Docking/MDI, SyntaxEditor, Ribbon, and Views with some big updates to all of those products.

We wanted to squeeze one last feature into SyntaxEditor for Silverlight (our upcoming code editor control) before locking down the code for RTM.  I’m pleased to announce that nearly all the IntelliPrompt completion list functionality found in the WPF version of SyntaxEditor will be available in the Silverlight version!

Let’s see an example…

Here we are editing code in SyntaxEditor and press Ctrl+Space.  This opens the completion list.  The completion list is populated via a language service, meaning that each language implementation decides what to show and when, generally by examining AST data for the document.  In this sample, we hard-coded some values.

Once the completion list was opened, I typed an underscore character and the first item matched on that typed text so it became highlighted.  Note that a description tip appeared next to the selected item, giving more detail about it.  Description tips are fully customizable and can be built using our custom mini-HTML formatting language, or by inserting Silverlight controls directly.

Note that there are a number of filter buttons and tabs in this completion list sample.  You can click those buttons and tabs to filter out items that are presented in the list.  I will uncheck the Method button and will select the Public members tab.  This means that methods will no longer be shown and only public members will be displayed.  Let’s see the result:

That is really neat because it updates live.  Note that use of the filter buttons and/or tabs is completely optional.  Since we filtered out the item that was matched by our typed text, the top item is now partially selected.

I hope this gives you a quick introduction to some of the upcoming SyntaxEditor for Silverlight’s completion list UI capabilities.  Just imagine what you can do with these features in a Silverlight-based online IDE!

This all will be available in the coming days when Silverlight Studio goes RTM!  Continue watching our blog for details.