The Actipro Blog

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).

What We Accomplished

In this quarter, we released the 2011.2 versions of WPF Studio and Silverlight Studio.  Numerous major new feature areas were added to SyntaxEditor, and WPF saw the release of our new Themes for WPF product, which unifies and improves how theming is done across our WPF products, adds full themes for native controls, and facilitates consistent app-wide themes.

What’s Coming Next

There are a lot of exciting things coming in the next several months:

• A brand new web site that has been in development for over a year
• Updates to our WinForms products
• A new product coming to WPF and Silverlight
• More SyntaxEditor features

Blog Post List

Here is a quick categorized list of useful blog postings made in this quarter.

• SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on - Anonymous Types
• WPF Studio 2011.2 Build 551 Released
• WPF Studio 2011.2 Released
• Themes for WPF Part 6 - Wrapping Up
• Themes for WPF Part 5 - Tinting Support
• Themes for WPF Part 4 - Built-In Themes
• Themes for WPF Part 3 - Docking/MDI Visual Updates
• Themes for WPF Part 2 - Common Asset Pool
• Themes for WPF Part 1 - Native WPF Control Themes
• Silverlight Studio 2011.2 Released

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...

What We Accomplished

In this quarter, we continued enhancing the 2011.1 versions of WPF Studio and Silverlight Studio.

SyntaxEditor added extensibility to context menus.  Its Web Languages Add-on was updated to allow XML validation for DTDs, and support for !DOCTYPE internal subsets.  Its .NET Languages Add-on improved resolver support for generic method type inference, lambda expressions, and more.  Documents no longer need a filename to get IntelliPrompt working, numerous XML comment editing features were added, code outlining for #regions and documentation comments were added, and overall IntelliPrompt was improved.

Docking/MDI added features for live splitting support, along with a visual preservation option for MVVM usage.  Other products received minor updates.

What’s Coming Next

Admittedly, we’ve been a little quiet lately.  The reason is that we’ve been hard at work on enhancements and new features!

So far, some of the recent blog posts (see below) have announced some very highly-requested new features coming to SyntaxEditor in the 2011.2 version.  These features are all wrapped up and ready to go.

We’re currently working on finishing up some very major themes updates that will be coming to WPF Studio.  We’ll be posting details on what these encompass in the coming couple of weeks.  As soon as they are completed, we’ll get the 2011.2 version out.

Blog Post List

Here is a quick categorized list of useful blog postings made in this quarter.

• Want SyntaxEditor in Windows 8 Metro?
• SyntaxEditor - Drag and Drop
• SyntaxEditor - Code Fragments
• SyntaxEditor - Single-Line Edit Mode
• SyntaxEditor - IntelliPrompt Parameter Info Samples
• SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on - IntelliPrompt Parameter Info
• Silverlight Studio 2011.1 Build 112 Released
• WPF Studio 2011.1 Build 544 Released

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.

In our last couple posts, we revealed the new IntelliPrompt parameter info features coming to SyntaxEditor for WPF/Silverlight in the 2011.2 version.  Today I’d like to show off another highly-requested feature coming in that version: single-line edit mode.

Many of our customers have asked for the ability to have a single-line mode without any scrollbars that would still have all the editing and visualization capabilities of SyntaxEditor, and that’s just what will be delivered in v2011.2.

A new SyntaxEditor.IsMultiLine property can be set to false to make the editor render like this:

In the top editor, we’re using the advanced XML language in the Web Languages Add-on.  You can see how I started typing a new tag and I have full syntax highlighting and automated IntelliPrompt, just like in a normal multi-line SyntaxEditor control.  Squiggle lines are also present, indicating syntax errors.

We’re very excited to get this new feature out into your hands in the next version.

In our last post, we showed off the new automated IntelliPrompt parameter info features coming to the C# and VB languages in the SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on for WPF/Silverlight.

These features can also be implemented in your own custom languages as well, since the .NET Languages Add-on uses the core parameter info UI model provided with the SyntaxEditor control.  In the upcoming 2011.2 version of SyntaxEditor, we’ve added documentation and new samples that show how to enhance your own languages with automated IntelliPrompt parameter info.

New Sample Screenshots

Let’s see some screenshots of the new samples:

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The past couple weeks, we’ve been working hard on the implementation of IntelliPrompt parameter info, which will be added to the SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on for WPF/Silverlight.  This blog post gives a first glimpse at how the automated IntelliPrompt parameter info looks.

The parameter info UI will also be available for use by any other custom language implementations as well, and we’ll be adding new samples to show such usage.  Without further ado, let’s see the new functionality as it is implemented for the .NET Languages Add-on.

Screenshots

This screenshot shows the parameter info displayed for a C# variable’s indexer.  The variable is implicitly typed and resolves to List<int>.  Note how both the documentation comments for the indexer and the documentation comments for the current parameter are displayed.

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Silverlight Studio 2011.1 build 112 has been released and is now available for download.

This maintenance release adds several large new features for SyntaxEditor and its add-ons:

• SyntaxEditor: Updated the XML language definition to support !DOCTYPE internal subsets.
• SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on: Documents no longer need a filename set to get automated IntelliPrompt working, making it easier to get started.
• SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on: Improved the resolver to support generic method type inference, lambda expressions, and more.
• SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on: Added numerous features to make the editing of XML comments easier.
• SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on: Improved all automated IntelliPrompt features.
• SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on: Added code outlining for #region blocks and documentation comments.

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

What We Accomplished

In this quarter, we continued enhancing the 2011.1 versions of WPF Studio and Silverlight Studio.

Docking/MDI for WPF received an innovative linked DockSite feature, that allows you to drag docking windows between two or more separate DockSites.  Auto-hide flyouts were updated to support interop content.

PropertyGrid for WPF added a new interop feature for allowing customers transitioning from WinForms to use their old UITypeEditor’s in drop-downs or dialogs, just like they did with the WinForms PropertyGrid.

Editors for WPF added support for entering gradient brushes in BrushEditBox, part of those updates being the addition of ColorComponentSlider and GradientBrushSlider to the Shared Library.

SyntaxEditor added support for AST node ID values and code generation from the Language Designer.

The SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on received an enormous number of new resolver and automated IntelliPrompt features: completion, generic types, type inference, extension methods, doc comment display, doc comment stub generation, generic method type parameter inference, lambda expressions, and much more.

What’s Coming Next

We’ll hopefully be publishing another maintenance release of the 2011.1 WPF and Silverlight products in the next week or two.  This release will include all of the new features recently blogged about for the SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on, along with other miscellaneous updates to various products.

Following that, we will begin work on the 2011.2 codebase.  We already have a very good start on a new product that will be added for that codebase, which we will reveal in time.  We also will be jumping back into adding more features to the core SyntaxEditor control.  Things like parameter info, single line mode, etc. have been requested by a lot of customers and we plan to deliver those in 2011.2.

Blog Post List

Here is a quick categorized list of useful blog postings made in this quarter.  More...