Bill Henning (Actipro)
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While we are currently finalizing our major new control product 2016.1 versions, we wanted to release a new poll on our site to gauge customer thoughts on the various Microsoft UI platforms.
This input will help to guide our development efforts in the future, so we highly encourage all of you to take a couple minutes and fill it out. It gathers quick input on your thoughts of the WPF, UWP, WinForms, and other platforms.
Thank you for taking the time to give us your valued feedback!
In this quarter, we've focused on completing the Docking/MDI vNext features that have been described in this blog thus far, along with many others, making it the most feature-rich product of its kind for WPF. Docking/MDI vNext is now feature complete and will ship in the upcoming 2016.1 version.
Another set of major work that will be included in the 2016.1 WPF Controls is updates to our theming system. We have fully-implemented seven color options for both the Office 2016-like Colorful and White themes, bringing a total of 14 new themes to the WPF controls. We are moving our Metro themes directly into the Shared library so that Metro Light will now be the default theme for all Windows 8.x and 10 systems. The old Luna/Royale themes that are for XP appearance are being moved into their own separate assembly. Since Microsoft has stopped supporting Windows XP, moving these themes out reduces the Shared assembly size while still allowing the themes to be utilized programmatically by apps that want them.
Finally, we have been porting the WinRT/XAML controls to UWP and while most of this work is complete, there were unexpected issues introduced by UWP's usage of .NET Native that we had to work with Microsoft to overcome.
The launch of our 2016.1 versions is just around the corner that will contain massive enhancements described for WPF per above.
We will also continue wrapping up the UWP controls. Please write our support address if you are interesting in help beta test them.
Bill Henning (Actipro)
While the final testing of our major Docking/MDI vNext enhancements is ongoing (the result of which will be in the WPF Controls 2016.1 release), we're also working on other new features for the 2016.1 release. Part of these updates will be some adjustments to themes.
For some quick background, our WindowChrome class can be attached to any WPF Window to custom render its chrome, using the Actipro Themes. In the most recent 2015.1 build, we updated the WindowChrome outer shadow to render similar to other Windows 10 apps so that it fits right in with Windows 10.
For our upcoming 2016.1 version, we are making more adjustments. Title bar buttons in the Metro themes are now the standard size found in other Windows 10 apps, which are much more touch friendly since they are significantly larger than before. We also have updated the Close button to use red highlights on hover (see screenshot below) and press, similar to Windows 10 buttons.
The new 2016.1 appearance of Metro themed title bar buttons
In 2016.1, the title bar buttons have the fresh new crisp glyphs that match Windows 10 as well. Compare the title bar buttons in the above screenshot to the buttons in the same app in our 2015.1 version:
The 2015.1 appearance of Metro themed title bar buttons
These sort of UI enhancements to our Metro themes are subtle, yet they really help your app's visual cohesiveness with Windows 10.
The features described above will be available in the 2016.1 version of our WPF controls.
Bill Henning (Actipro)
Alongside the development of Docking/MDI vNext for WPF, we have been working on porting our WinRT/XAML Controls to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP). This is a full port of our existing controls available for the WinRT/XAML platform, but made for UWP and Windows 10 app development.
We are currently looking for beta testers for these controls. If you would like to participate in beta testing, please contact our support address.
Bill Henning (Actipro)
We've spent the last several months working intensely on completely rebuilding the internals of our market-leading WPF Docking/MDI product. This project is called "Docking/MDI vNext" and keeps the same general API surface, while providing even more advanced features in every area of the product, evolving it into a true best-of-breed docking tool window and MDI functionality solution.
Great news… after several months of development and testing, Docking/MDI vNext is now out of beta and considered complete! Check out our recent blog posts to see a list of several of the major features that are included in this new version.
The updates we made will be released as part of our WPF Controls 2016.1 offering that will likely officially roll out live in January or early February. We'll have a full summary of the new features on the blog then.
If you would like to get a preview build of 2016.1 and start working with everything now, please write our support address. The major Docking/MDI vNext updates are considered code complete and stable at this point. We have new and updated samples and documentation, updated Prism 6.1 compatibility, and a lot more. The documentation gives detail on all new features and any breaking changes you might encounter. We'd love to get some more users including it their apps and giving us some final feedback before a public release.