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by Bill Henning (Actipro)
August 26, 2010 at 09:20
We’ve been hard at work on WPF Studio 2010.2, which we should have out in September. One new product that will ship along side of it is a port of our Web Languages Add-on that we have for the WinForms SyntaxEditor. This add-on has an advanced XML syntax language implementation that allows you to specify an XML schema set to provide validation and automated IntelliPrompt within the code editor, all with just a few lines of code. Let’s take a peek at a new HTML Editor demo we’re adding to WPF Studio to show off the add-on: 
Here we have the sample that shows an XHTML document loaded. We’ve configured our advanced XML language with an XSD we downloaded from the W3C for XHTML. And with a few lines of code, voila, instant HTML editor! More...
by Bill Henning (Actipro)
July 27, 2010 at 10:16
As mentioned in a previous post we have been working very hard on developing a custom grammar and AST object model that will be an optional free part of SyntaxEditor for WPF/Silverlight products going forward, hopefully starting with the 2010.2 version. We’ve been using this new grammar/AST design to prototype out a WPF version of an advanced XML syntax language implementation. The XML language will eventually contain the same or better feature set as those found in the WinForms Web Languages Add-on. Today I’d like to give a quick glimpse into some initial features we have working. AST (abstract syntax tree) construction Our new grammar has a tree construction syntax that makes it very easy to create an AST of a document. Take this XML code for example… 
The grammar parser we built for XML will construct an AST that looks like this when output to a string: CompilationUnit[
Element[
"a"
Nodes[
Element[
"b"
Nodes[
Comment[]
]
EndTag[]
]
]
EndTag[]
]
]
Each node in the AST automatically gets assigned an offset range based on what generated it, which becomes important when we get into features below such as code outlining. More...
by Bill Henning (Actipro)
June 17, 2010 at 10:41
After many months of hard work, we’ve finished the first version of Silverlight Studio and have released it to the public! 
Products Silverlight Studio contains these products: We’re really excited to see what our customers do with SyntaxEditor, since that sort of control opens up all sorts of possibilities for online development/scripting applications. Live Demo and Free Evaluation We have a live demo that you can run if you have Silverlight 4 installed. It showcases the controls: We encourage you to download a free evaluation of the suite and try it out in Visual Studio 2010 or Blend. Note that if you use VS 2010, you must have the Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 installed from Microsoft. Moving Forward Once you get a chance to check out the new products, please send us some feedback. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Have fun coding!
by Bill Henning (Actipro)
June 15, 2010 at 05:04
Today we uploaded our final update to the Silverlight Studio closed beta. We are just finishing up designer functionality and then will be ready for Silverlight Studio’s public release. Our goal is to have it out sometime this week. Keep watching our blog and Twitter posts for breaking news.
by Bill Henning (Actipro)
May 27, 2010 at 03:39
We’re very close now to having a Silverlight Studio closed beta test ready to go, probably in the next several days! Here’s a screenshot taken yesterday: 
Some things to note… Silverlight Studio comes with complete menu/menuitem/contextmenu set of controls, a toolbar control, and custom styles for buttons. Not only that but they come in the default Aero theme, along with the 3 Office 2010 themes. We even have a ThemeManager that lets you switch these themes dynamically at run-time. Closed beta test We’re currently working on the deployment scripts and finishing up some final items before the first closed beta test is ready. We expect this to be ready in the next several days. This first beta will be a closed beta test, meaning that you will have to sign up to participate. Note that documentation topics will likely not be available in this first beta test, however there will be a complete set of samples and much of the WPF Studio documentation on similar products applies to Silverlight Studio products. While the closed beta test is going on, we will be finalizing things such as documentation, designer functionality, etc., in preparation for a public beta release. Signing up for the closed beta test If you are interested in participating in the closed beta test, please email our sales address with: - Your name and e-mail address
- Company
- Which other Actipro products you own
- What interests you most about Silverlight Studio
- What you plan to do with Silverlight Studio products
- Which other products you’d like to see implemented in Silverlight (in priority order)
Please only sign up if you are willing to use the products immediately and provide constructive feedback. Thanks and we look forward to hearing from you!
by Bill Henning (Actipro)
April 19, 2010 at 06:46
We recently released WPF Studio 2010.1, which includes the new Views for WPF product. This product includes several panels that uses various fluid animations on the associated child elements. This means you can have fade in/out as they are added/removed from the panel, or smoothly transition to a new position/size. Panels WPF comes with several built-in panels and we've included drop-in replacements for some of these, with more to come in the future. We also included a couple panels not found in WPF, that can make your application more attractive. The SwitchPanel can be used to dynamically change the layout logic without having to move the elements to a new parent or regenerate the container elements. The ZapPanel works like a StackPanel, but centers a focal item in the view and can wrap items to produce a circular effect. 
A ListBox using a ZapPanel as its ItemsPanel The full list of panels includes: - AnimatedCanvas - Represents a panel that positions child elements using explicit coordinates that are relative to the panel.
- AnimatedDockPanel - Represents a panel that positions child elements either horizontally or vertically, relative to each other.
- AnimatedStackPanel - Represents a panel that positions child elements in sequential order, either horizontally or vertically.
- AnimatedWrapPanel - Represents a panel that positions child elements in sequential order, breaking content to the next row or column at the edge of the containing box.
- SwitchPanel - Represents a panel that delegates the positioning of the child elements to one or more child panels.
- ZapPanel - Represents a panel that positions child elements in sequential order, while keeping a focal item centered in the view.
You can build custom panels that leverage the fluid animations and framework just as easily as before. We provide step-by-step instructions on building a "random" panel, that arranges it's child elements at random locations. The full source code, in C# and VB.NET, for the random panel is included in our Sample Browser. Animations There are several built-in animations that can be easily configured. Elements of the panel can be animated differently depending on whether they were just added, removed, or simply changing location/size. Do you want to zoom in elements from the background when they are added and them zoom them out when being removed? No problem. Do you want to have them rotate a bit as they zoom? That's easy to add. Custom animations can be created, so you can fully customize how elements are animated. The Views panels leverage native WPF animations, such as DoubleAnimation, so you don't need to learn a new animation framework. You just need to return a Storyboard for a given element based on it's current state. Silverlight The Views for Silverlight product, which has not been released yet, was developed in parallel with the View for WPF product. Therefore, the framework is largely compatible across WPF and Silverlight. This allows you easily port any custom panels over to Silverlight later. Summary The Views for WPF product can be easily added to your WPF applications to give them a little flair. We will be adding more new custom panels in the near future. If you have any suggestions, please email us.
by Bill Henning (Actipro)
April 14, 2010 at 04:41
A very major new version of WPF Studio is now live and ready for download. We’ll post more info on the updates in the coming days but a quick summary with links to related blog posts is: For a detailed change list, please see this announcement. Upgrade notes Since 2010.1 is a major new version, 2009.2 customers will need new license keys to use the 2010.1 version. If you are an existing customer and have an active subscription, you can log into your Actipro account and there should be a link near the top of your Organization Purchases page allowing you to request a free upgrade to 2010.1. Alternatively if your subscription has expired, you can order a renewal from our purchasing pages. If you are using individual WPF products but would like to switch to either the WPF Essentials bundle or WPF Studio suite, e-mail our sales team and we’ll be happy to discuss discounted upgrade options. What’s next? Be sure to check out our What we’re working on in early 2010 posting from several weeks ago, as that gives a high-level overview of where our development efforts are at right now. Today’s WPF Studio 2010.1 release includes all the WPF Studio items in that posting. In the coming weeks we are planning on adding more custom panels to the new Views for WPF product. Our primary focus will be on finishing off the public beta for the first Silverlight Studio version though. Since Silverlight 4 is coming out this week, we will be targeting it. The first two controls in the Silverlight Studio bundle will be SyntaxEditor and Views. We also will be working on getting the wpfpedia.com reference guide rewrite live in the coming weeks. The code for it is about done, we just want to add some more content before publishing it. As you can see, 2010 is off to a great start with our products and there’s plenty more coming soon.
by Bill Henning (Actipro)
April 14, 2010 at 04:19
Actipro’s unique bundle of Windows Presentation Foundation user interface controls offers everything developers need to add advanced UI functionality to their Windows Presentation Foundation applications. Cleveland, OH – April 12, 2010 – Actipro Software has enhanced their WPF Studio user interface control suite to fully integrate with Visual Studio 2010. Integration includes Visual Studio designer surface extensibility for quick control customization, item templates that get customers up and running quickly, and toolbox entries. In addition, the hundreds of product samples packaged with WPF Studio are included in Visual Studio 2010 project format. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 is now the best-of-breed IDE for creating Windows Presentation Foundation applications. Microsoft has built upon the strengths of Visual Studio 2008 and improved features across the board. The numerous productivity, debugging, testing, and extensibility enhancements undoubtedly cut down on application development time. As Windows Presentation Foundation application developers migrate to Visual Studio’s latest version, they can rest assured that Actipro Software’s Windows Presentation Foundation user interface control products are designed to integrate with and take advantage of new functionality found in Visual Studio 2010. “Many of our customers have indicated to us that they plan on moving to Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4 platform immediately upon RTM,” said Bill Henning, President of Actipro Software. “It’s very important for us at Actipro to support our customers as we move into the Visual Studio 2010 era and make sure that our products fit well into the workflow of their application creation. Not only have we added design-time support for Microsoft’s new IDE version, but we have also moved our own product codebases to the latest as well.” The WPF Studio suite includes 12 products, with a total of over 55 Windows Presentation Foundation user interface controls: Bar Code, DataGrid, Docking & MDI, Editors, Gauge, Navigation, PropertyGrid, Ribbon, SyntaxEditor, Views, Wizard and the Shared Library. “We think that WPF developers will find many enhancements made in the .NET Framework 4 very appealing,” continued Bill Henning. “The capabilities added by the Dynamic Language Runtime provide for more language choice, parallel programming features help take advantage of multi-core processing, and new WPF controls and components make it easier to perform common tasks.” “Microsoft is pleased that Actipro, a Visual Studio Industry Partner, has invested early in supporting Visual Studio 2010 and our next-generation application development platform, and is this week simultaneously shipping the WPF Studio 2010.1 control suite,” said Dave Mendlen, senior director of Developer Marketing at Microsoft. “Products like the WPF Studio 2010.1 control suite help customers to simplify their development process from design to deployment when using Microsoft products like Visual Studio 2010 and.NET Framework 4.” Pricing and Availability The 2010.1 version of the Actipro WPF Studio suite that includes complete Visual Studio 2010 integration launches April 14, 2010. Single developer licenses for the bundle start at $649, which include a free subscription to obtain all product updates for a year. Bulk license discounts up to 40% off are available, as are Site and Enterprise licenses. Product source code is available via a Blueprint license. Visit www.actiprosoftware.com for details. About Actipro Software Actipro Software is a leading provider of .NET user interface controls for the WPF and WinForms frameworks. They have been making .NET UI controls since the inception of .NET and were the first vendor to release a commercial WPF control. Their WPF Studio suite contains everything a WPF application developer needs, including docking windows, MDI, ribbons, property grids, gauges, editors, and much more. Actipro is most well-known for their robust SyntaxEditor syntax-highlighting code editor control, which allows developers to easily bring a Visual Studio-like code editing experience into their own applications.
by Bill Henning (Actipro)
November 2, 2009 at 15:48
A couple months ago we make a post on our blog asking if anyone would be interested in a port of our SyntaxEditor for WPF control over to Silverlight. We’ve had some tremendous feedback, both via comments on that posting and via e-mail, so we’ve moved forward with development on the product. What is SyntaxEditor for Silverlight? As many of you know, SyntaxEditor for WPF is the premier syntax-highlighting code editor control for the WPF platform. It is being constructed with a new next-generation object model based on our years of experience with SyntaxEditor for WinForms, the market leader in the WinForms platform. We’ve made a lot of posts about SyntaxEditor for WPF’s features in this blog. The Silverlight version of SyntaxEditor is essentially a large subset of SyntaxEditor for WPF’s object model. For those who have used SyntaxEditor for WPF, the entire text/parsing library is completely converted to Silverlight. This means all the document, syntax language, parsing, etc. code works in Silverlight exactly the same as in WPF. The UI layer is mostly the same as well. Many of the UI features found in the WPF version are already implemented where possible in the Silverlight version. What can I use it for? The possibilities are endless. Want to have a web-based source code browser where you can edit your code from anywhere right in the browser? Want to build a web-based IDE? Want to just use the editor in read-only mode to provide rich visualization of code? SyntaxEditor for Silverlight would fit right into any of those conceptualizations. Let’s see the video! Without further ado, let’s take a look at the first video of SyntaxEditor for Silverlight. In this video, I fire up the editor in an Internet Explorer page and do some typing and selection. Note that syntax highlighting is being driven from a syntax language that was created with our WPF Language Designer application. I also have the smoke text effect enabled, which shows off the new adornment layers feature we’re currently working on. The smoke text effect is not something you’d normally have enabled in a production application, but it is a neat example of what you can do with our adornment layer framework. Summary There still is a lot of work to do on the Silverlight version before it would be production-ready. However we are trying to make some progress on it each day. And as we add any new features to the WPF version going forward, we are adding them to the Silverlight version at the same time. We don’t have any target release dates at this point, but keep your comments coming and we’ll continue posting more details on the control.
by Bill Henning (Actipro)
August 27, 2009 at 09:45
In the most recent WPF Studio 2009.1 builds, we've integrated with and enhanced Microsoft's open source WPF DataGrid.
The WPF DataGrid (from the WPF Toolkit) comes packed with lots of features and has very active and helpful community forums. Actipro has built two add-ons for the WPF DataGrid and added a variety of samples. More...
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