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.

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...

We’ve just released WPF Studio 2009.1 build 504.  This is a huge update and includes some major new functionality that we’ll talk about in more detail over the coming days.  In this post though, let’s do a brief overview of some of the larger updates.

See our related forum announcement for exact details on what updates were made in each product.

DataGrid for WPF After a lot of user demand, we’ve added DataGrid functionality to WPF Studio.  I’ve talked a lot about Actipro’s desire to embrace open source solutions as we move forward.  Here is another instance. A lot of developers may not realize it but Microsoft has created an official WPF DataGrid that is open source and part of their CodePlex WPF Toolkit project.  The DataGrid is slated to be part of .NET 4.0’s native controls as well.  The DataGrid has many of the core features you’ll find in any grid offering.    What we’ve done is made a number of extra enhancements and behaviors, and added them to an open source project of our own.  This project also includes new Office themes that match the look of our other controls, along with updated system themes that look better than the default.  Best of all, we’ve made the control take advantage of our ThemeManager so that you can switch themes on the fly. Our open source Contrib add-on is available on CodePlex at: http://actipro.codeplex.com/ We have taken things another step forward by offering an interop assembly that makes it simple to integrate our the masked and part-based editors in our Editors for WPF product with the DataGrid. Be sure to download the build 504 evaluation to see the new DataGrid functionality in action.

SyntaxEditor for WPF MGrammar add-on gets asynchronous parsing, error reporting features The MGrammar add-on has been updated to use our parsing framework.  Now when the Oslo Dataflow add-on is being used, as the end user types in the SyntaxEditor, a parse request is queued up and dispatched to a worker thread.  The worker thread parses the entire document in the SyntaxEditor and builds an AST and list of syntax errors.  These are returned back to the SyntaxEditor asynchronously, with no UI thread blocking. The MGrammar Integration sample has been updated to show an AST and error list that are built asynchronously as you type. Free ANTLR add-on added A popular request for years has been the ability to integrate the ANTLR parser with SyntaxEditor.  With today’s release, this is now easy and can be done with very little code.  The ANTLR add-on allows you to enable automated asynchronous parsing calls to the ANTLR parser, similar to the functionality described above for MGrammar. This previous blog post describes the functionality in detail. A new sample project has been added to demo this add-on. Completion list enhancements (auto-shrink, performance improvement) We’ve implemented another popular request item for completion lists: the ability to auto-shrink the visible list of completion items as the end user types.  This functionality is found in Visual Studio when editing VB files. See this previous blog post for details and a series of screenshots showing the functionality. The performance of the completion list item matcher algorithms has been improved in a number of areas too. Hit testing This build adds the ability to perform detailed hit testing within SyntaxEditor.  You simply pass it a Point and it returns an object that tells you everything you need to know about what is at that location.  We’ve added a new QuickStart to show off the hit testing feature.

Now that the public beta of SyntaxEditor for WPF has been released, I’d like to show off a really neat feature that you probably haven’t heard about yet.  Microsoft has been working on a new modeling technology that has been codenamed “Oslo”.  You can read all about it here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/oslo/default.aspx

One piece of Oslo is the ability to create GLR-based text parsers that basically parse text and output an AST node graph.  This part of Oslo is called MGrammar.  We first looked into this technology back at PDC 2008 and became involved with the Oslo team shortly thereafter.  Special thanks go out to Chris Sells and his team for all their help.  Our goal was to make an add-on for our SyntaxEditor control that provided syntax highlighting within the control based on an MGrammar DSL parser.

We’ve implemented this new Oslo Dataflow Add-on and have included it in the WPF Studio 2009.1 release that came out last week.  Download the WPF Studio Evaluation to check it out… it includes a complete sample project showing how simple it is to get working.  More...

Yesterday evening we published WPF Studio 2009.1, which includes the first SyntaxEditor for WPF public beta and the official release of Editors for WPF.  These products have been highly requested by our customers so we’re very pleased to get them out into your hands.  More...

We’re very happy to announce the release of a brand new media product that can be used by any application or web developer:  Actipro Icons.

Let's face it, most developers don't have the graphical skills it takes to make quality icons. And even if they do, proper icon creation takes a huge time investment. This is where Actipro Icons comes into play.

Actipro Icons provides a low-cost, yet complete solution for your graphics needs when building applications. It is a professionally-designed bundle of 10 categorized icon sets, containing over 1,750 unique icon designs, all in the Office 2007 style.

When counting the size, state, and format variations of each design, there are over 21,000 images included in the bundle.

Learn more about Actipro Icons

Multiple Sizes and States

All of the Actipro Icons (see our preview page) are implemented in 16x16 and 32x32 pixel sizes, with normal, hot and disabled states for each.

The sample images above show the six variations of a "slide-show play" icon that are included in both alpha-blended PNG and Icon formats.

Pixel-Perfect Quality at Small Sizes

When comparing icon sets with other competitors, it's extremely important to look closely at the quality of the icons at the 32x32 and 16x16 pixel sizes, since nearly all practical icon usage is at those resolutions.

Here's where our product stands out. Most icon sets are designed for 256x256 size and then are just scaled down to 32x32 and 16x16 sizes. As any graphics designer will tell you, once you scale down an image like this, the result is a very poor quality image that is full of anti-aliasing and a has a general lack of clarity.

Actipro Icons are different. Every single one of our icons have been "cleaned up" following scaling, and a good amount of extra work has been done in some cases to get icons looking spectacular in 32x32 and 16x16 sizes. We fully encourage you to compare the quality of our icons with competitors.

Download Sampler

Download a free sampler containing several icons so that you can see the quality for yourself:

Download sampler

We're very happy to have just released PropertyGrid for WPF, a control we've been working on for several months.  The PropertyGrid control combines the best features of the Windows Forms PropertyGrid, the PropertyGrids in both Visual Studio and Expression Blend, and has a number of unique features you won't find in our competition.

Try a Live XBAP Demo

Run our WPF Studio Live Demo to see PropertyGrid in action without leaving your browser.

Downloading PropertyGrid for WPF

You can download PropertyGrid for WPF as part of our new v4.5 release of WPF Studio that just came out.  It has a bunch of QuickStarts not found in the Live Demo and also includes extensive documentation on using the control.

If you would like to try an evaluation, go to our Download WPF Studio Evaluation page.

If you are an existing WPF Studio customer with an active subscription, you can get the update for free by requesting a free upgrade from your Actipro Organization Purchases page.

Feature List

Check out this list of extensive features:

Factory Features

• Factory architecture allows for complete customization of the items presented.
• Built-in factories for TypeDescriptor and simple Type reflection provide the most common methods of retrieving properties.
• Statically defined items can be used in place of, or in addition to, any items dynamically generated by a factory.
• Ability to merge multiple objects, which means only properties common to all objects are presented.
• Properties can be automatically sorted and custom SortDescriptions can be defined.
• Support for expandable properties and lazy loading, which allows for cyclic references and faster load times.
• Full support and integration with the WPF data validation infrastructure.
• Properties can be automatically categorized, with support for CategoryAttribute.
• Simple filtering supported via "browsable" attributes, which specifies attributes that must be defined on a property for it to be included.
• Attached properties are supported and can be filtered, when using the built-in TypeDescriptor factory.
• Support for BrowsableAttribute, DisplayNameAttribute, DescriptionAttribute, and several other ComponentModel attributes.
• Support for ICustomTypeDescriptor, when using the built-in TypeDescriptor factory.
• Asynchronous mode allows for property retrieval to be executed in a separate thread.

Editor Features

• Several built-in property editors are provided, with more to come in later releases.
• Support for custom property editors, which can be used to customize the look and/or feel of a given property.
• Property editors can be defined globally, on a single PropertyGrid, or on specific property (e.g. via EditorAttribute).
• Property editors can be tied to a property by name, Type, or both, which allows for all properties of a specified Type to use the same editor.
• Support for custom category editors, which can be used to provide more complex interfaces for presenting/modifying specified properties.

Appearance Features

• Includes fully customizable and resizable summary area, which shows details about the selected item.
• Easily configurable transitions supported in the summary area.
• Built-in themes for Aero, Office 2007 blue/black/silver, Luna blue/olive/silver, classic, and high-contrast.
• Includes a fully customizable context menu, with standard menu items already initialized and handled via built-in commands.

Layout, Globalization, and Accessibility Features

• Columns can be customized as needed to provide a new look or feel, columns can even be added or removed.
• Resize columns from any where in the control, or programmatically.
• Right-to-left support is fully integrated for languages such as Hebrew or Arabic.
• All text properties use localization attributes, and string resources may be customized.
• Follows the WPF accessibility model for UI automation.

Code and Requirements

• Includes detailed documentation and a sample project that demos nearly every feature.
• Written in 100% pure C# and is based on the Windows Presentation Foundation framework.
• Requires the .NET 3.0 or 3.5 run-time framework.
• Full XAML support and XBAP compatibility.
• Extensive Visual Studio 2008 designer capabilities.
• Visual Studio 2008 and/or Expression Blend are recommended development tools for this product.

We're very happy to have just released WPF Studio v4.0.  This version is the culmination of several months of work and we're sure you'll love what you see.

Download Actipro WPF Studio v4.0 now

To celebrate, we'll be posting details about a special promotion for existing UIStudio for WinForms customers who are looking to get into the WPF arena.

Docking & MDI for WPF

Actipro Docking & MDI is a complete solution for easily adding a docking tool window and/or multiple document interface to your WPF applications. Allow your end users to drag and dock tool windows wherever they please, and to persist their customizations. Also use this product to fill the gap left by Microsoft not including an MDI mechanism in the WPF platform.

Docking & MDI has been implemented with flexibility in mind. It has more options than nearly any other competitive product out there and mimics Visual Studio 2008's capabilities. While it supports all the types of standard layouts you find in most docking window products, it also supports some extended functionality that you won't find anywhere else.

Check out more information about the product or try a live demo on our site.

Gauge for WPF

Actipro Gauge is a control suite that implements circular, linear, and digital gauge controls for the Windows Presentation Foundation framework. Each gauge control has tons of options available, providing for limitless possibilities.

Gauge controls are ideal for displaying several data points in a concise and compact area. Everything from car dashboards to medical and industrial equipment use gauges, and are quickly recognized and understood by users.

The circular and linear gauges are perfect for presenting a value, or values, bound by a specific range. The digital gauge is perfect for mimicking real-life LED displays.

Check out more information about the product or try a live demo on our site.

Other Enhancements

There were a lot of other minor enhancements and tweaks made throughout our WPF control products for this release.  We added several new demos and useful utilities as well.

Theme Browser

One great new utility found in WPF Studio is the Theme Browser.  A WPF Studio customer was kind enough to post a simple theme browser for our controls in the WPF Studio forums for the benefit of other customers.

We took this idea and ran with it, making a very helpful utility that lets you browse each Brush resource used by our products for the various themes.  The utility shows a preview of each Brush and even allows you to copy a DynamicResource reference accessing the Brush to the clipboard so that you can reuse it in your applications as long as the same theme is loaded.

This is really useful for those of you making some customizations to other controls and wanting to use the same Brushes as us so that you have a consistent look in your application.

String Resource Browser

Going along with the Theme Browser idea, we wanted to make a String Resource Browser.  All our products that display text in the user interface stores the default text in string resources.  You can customize or localize the text in code-behind via a single line of code for each item. 

The String Resource Browser lets you examine all the string resources used in our various products.  When you select a string resource, you have the ability to enter a customized version of it.  The Browser even generates the C# and VB code you can paste into your application to perform the customization.

We've had a lot of interest from customers regarding our product roadmap for WPF development.  I wanted to post where things currently stand and where our future development priorities lay.  I also would like to give customers the opportunity to voice their opinion as to what they would most like to see added to WPF Studio down the road.

In addition, we are now announcing a new WPF product that will be available after the WPF Studio v4.0 release:  PropertyGrid for WPF.

WPF Product Roadmap

Here is the roadmap for WPF development as of June 2008.

WPF Studio v4.0 Release

The WPF Studio v4.0 release will be available in the next several weeks.  We are still finishing up the two new products that have been added and are in the process of adding samples, documentation, etc. 

Actipro Docking & MDI for WPF

The Docking product implements docking tool windows and MDI functionality for WPF.  We haven't talked too much about the feature set yet, however we'll get into that closer to release time.  Rest assured though that themes are created for all Windows system themes, along with all three Office themes.  It also will offer a huge number of options.

Use the docking tag to search for info on this product in the Actipro blog.

Actipro Gauge for WPF

The Gauge product makes it easy to create any sort of circular, linear, or digital gauge.  These gauges can be used to represent data in digital dashboards, provide virtual instrumentation, and much more.

Use the gauge tag to search for info on this product in the Actipro blog.

After WPF Studio v4.0

The following two products have had work started on them but were placed on hold temporarily while we divert our development resources towards getting WPF Studio v4.0 out the door.

PropertyGrid for WPF

A new product, PropertyGrid for WPF, will provide property grid functionality similar to that found in Visual Studio and Expression Blend.  We will get into more details about the product following the WPF Studio v4.0 release.  However its development is already fairly far along, and we expect it to be ready within a few weeks after the WPF Studio v4.0 release.

SyntaxEditor for WPF

SyntaxEditor for WPF will provide the high quality code editing experience you expect from Actipro, the industry leader in syntax highlighting editing controls and components.  One SyntaxEditor for WPF design goal is to make a common document/parsing library so that it can be shared with the next Windows Forms SyntaxEditor v5.0 and CodeHighlighter.  We also have a ton of new features planned that we will start posting about in the future.

As a WPF Studio Customer, Will I Receive These Products for Free?

As long as your WPF Studio subscription is active when a product is released, you will be eligible to upgrade to the new version and get any new products added to WPF Studio for free.  Each WPF Studio developer license includes a free subscription that can be renewed at its expiration date each year.

What Would You Like to See Added?

Let's hear your comments on what you'd like to see added that hasn't been listed in our roadmap above.

Some suggestions from customers have included:

• Grid
• Chart/graph
• Scheduling
• Reporting

Please post a comment and rank in order of priority which of these (or your own suggestions) that you would like us to work on.

At Actipro, the opinions of our customers matter and your feedback really will help steer our long term future development efforts.

Explorer bar is an implementation of the task bar that was introduced in Windows XP's explorer. It hosts a vertical stack of expandable panes that generally provide task-based information to the end user.

Any content can be placed within each expander pane and the alternate style of pane headers is supported via a simple style setting.

Animated Expander Panes

Each expander pane uses smooth animation to fade in and slide down its contents when expanded. Likewise, when an expander pane is collapsed, its contents fade out and slide back up.

Themes

This product includes 4 distinct built-in themes and is fully extensible so that other product themes can be custom developed. Themes can be tinted towards any color or set of colors, and brush resources from them may be reused.

Single Expansion Option

An option is available to only permit a single expander pane to be expanded at any time. By default, any number of expander panes may be expanded.

Globalization

This control fully supports left-to-right layouts and user interface resource string customization.

Designer Support

ExplorerBar has designer support similar to our other controls.  For instance when working in Visual Studio 2008, you have access to task panes for the controls:

ExplorerBar installs toolbox items for VS 2008.  It even includes an item template that is available from the New Item pane in VS 2008 that when selected, creates a new Window with a simple ExplorerBar on it.

Getting ExplorerBar Free

Any Actipro WPF Studio customer with an active subscription is eligible to get ExplorerBar for free!