Earlier this week we posted new builds of many products, including WPF Studio. The latest WPF Studio build now has a new QuickStart that shows how easy the Themes portion of WPF Studio makes it to customize other products such as Docking/MDI.
The first release of WPF Studio 2011.2 made some visual updates to Docking/MDI that went with a more high-contrast look that focuses the user's eye on content, instead of the docking UI. This look is similar to Visual Studio 2010 (Aero theme shown below):
We had a couple customers request an option to use the older lighter appearance that was present is past versions. So for build 552 we added a QuickStart showing how easy it is to customize the entire look of the Docking/MDI product. We provide full source lighter alternate Docking/MDI themes for Aero, Office Blue, and Office Silver in this QuickStart.
Here is the alternate theme for Aero:
The QuickStart demonstrates how you can wire up alternate themes to use and take effect whenever the app's theme is changed. Download WPF Studio's latest build to see this new QuickStart in action.
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.
In the WPF Studio 2011.2 build that was just released, we added resolver and IntelliPrompt support for anonymous types. Now the add-on supports those features for extension methods, lambdas, and anonymous types. All of those things are the building blocks for future LINQ IntelliPrompt!
Anonymous Type IntelliPrompt Examples
Let's see some examples of automated IntelliPrompt for anonymous types.
In this screenshot, we have implicitly declared a variable anon as an anonymous type. The anonymous type's properties are initialized using a variable, and a couple assignment. Hovering over anon to display quick info reveals anon as an anonymous type. More...
WPF Studio 2011.2 build 551 has been released and is now available for download.
This maintenance release fixes a couple bugs introduced in the previous build related to WPF/WinForms interop so it is highly recommended as an immediate download if you use our WPF products in a WinForms app or use interop controls in Docking/MDI.
The SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on adds resolver and IntelliPrompt support for anonymous types.
Docking/MDI adds a highly-requested WindowStateChanged event, that is raised when a docking window's state has changed.
See the announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.
We’re very pleased to announce that WPF Studio 2011.2 build 550 has been released and is now available for download.
This version has enormous updates for all products that unifies and improves how theming is done, and provides optional themes for native WPF controls that look great next to Actipro controls, thus facilitating consistent app-wide themes. SyntaxEditor also has received numerous new highly-requested feature areas such as IntelliPrompt parameter info, single-line edit mode, code fragments, and drag and drop.
Major new features are described below. See the announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.
Stunning App-Wide Themes
Actipro Themes includes professionally-designed themes that cover all system, Office themes, and high contrast mode.
The themes apply to all Actipro controls and optionally to native WPF controls. This ensures that no matter what combination of controls you use in your app, it will look great! More...
This post concludes our series on the Actipro Themes being added for all our WPF controls in the upcoming 2011.2 version. We hope you have enjoyed seeing the new theme-related features that are just around the corner.
To sum up, Actipro Themes has these major features:
- Over 10 professionally-designed themes, including all system and Office themes
- Enhanced styles/templates for native WPF controls with the latest UI designs
- Native WPF control styles/templates can be applied app-wide with one line of code or used on a case-by-case basis
- Reusable styles/templates for common scenarios such as embedded buttons and glyphs
- A common pool of reusable brush assets, used by the styles/templates for both Actipro's custom controls and native WPF controls
- Special brush assets, such as ones for container and workspace backgrounds
- All assets can be customized globally or on a per-theme basis
- Brush assets are organized into tint groups that can each be tinted towards any color, allowing for easy custom theme generation
Beta Testing and Final Release
If you are an existing customer and are interested in beta testing Actipro Themes and the rest of WPF Studio 2011.2 (like all the new SyntaxEditor features), please e-mail us ASAP. We’re expecting to start the beta test early next week.
The final release should be out several days following the beta test start.
This post continues our series on the Actipro Themes being added for all our WPF controls in the upcoming 2011.2 version.
In the last post, we looked at the various built-in themes that will ship with Actipro Themes. In today’s post, we’ll peek at the tinting features that are included.
What is Tinting?
Tinting is ability of taking a pre-defined WPF Brush or Pen and creating a clone of the object with color changes to be more like a certain target color.
If you take a brush and tint it towards a gray color, you end up with a grayish brush that has the saturation characteristics of the original brush. The Actipro Themes object model that ships in our Shared Library has a number of helper extension methods that make allow you to tint any Brush or Pen.
Tinting Themes
While you can tint brush and pens individually, it’s much more useful to be able to tint large quantities of brush/pen assets at the same time. Especially when you consider there are over 800 assets in the common asset pool for each built-in theme!
Actipro Themes supports the tinting of any theme or portion of a theme towards a certain color. This means that you can take a built-in theme like the Office Silver theme, and make it a red one instead. More...
This post continues our series on the Actipro Themes being added for all our WPF controls in the upcoming 2011.2 version.
In the last post, we looked at the updated visual design we’ve applied to our Docking/MDI product that looks great with the new native WPF menu/toolbar styles we include with Actipro Themes.
In today’s post we’ll take a peek at some of the themes that are built into Actipro themes.
System Themes
System themes are included right inside the WPF Shared Library and will automatically activate on any Actipro themed controls based on the current operating system theme. Of course specific themes can also be set on the Actipro theme manager.
Aero | Luna (Normal Color)
 |
Luna (Homestead) | Luna (Metallic)
 |
Royale | Classic |
Office Themes
The three Office themes make your application look just like the Office suite of applications. These themes are shipped in a separate assembly to trim down on Shared Library size when the Office themes aren’t needed. They can be activated by adding a reference to our Office themes assembly and registering them with a single line of code.
Office Black | Office Blue |
Office Silver | |
High Contrast
The high contrast theme can optionally be activated when it is detected that the system is in high contrast mode. It’s designed to make controls stand out to those who are visually impaired.
High Contrast | |
Future Themes
Actipro Themes makes it easy for us to tweak existing and develop new themes in the future. Anybody want a lighter Metro-like or other theme? Send us your comments and we’ll log the requests.
Summary
Whether you want to have your application fit into the current system theme or have it look more like Office, Actipro Themes has you covered.
In our next post, we’ll take a look at the tinting support in Actipro Themes.
This post continues our series on the Actipro Themes being added for all our WPF controls in the upcoming 2011.2 version.
The previous post covered the new common asset pool and how it helps us achieve a level of visual consistency throughout all our custom control products as well as WPF native controls that you won’t find elsewhere.
In today’s post, we’ll take a glimpse at the major visual facelift we’ve done on the Docking/MDI for WPF product for the 2011.2 version.
Goals
As seen in the first post of this series, Actipro Themes will include updated menu, toolbar, and statusbar appearances that were inspired by Visual Studio 2010’s look. For the 2011.2 version, we wanted to extend this look to the Docking/MDI product as well since it is very often used with menus, toolbars, and statusbars.
The design of the VS 2010 is interesting in that it goes a bit more high contrast by using dark workspace colors to deemphasize the unimportant portions of the user interface. It contrasts this by using light colors for the content area of each document and tool window. There are fewer lines used for borders, which simplifies the appearance and reduces unnecessary distracting UI.
We’ve taken these concepts and ran with them for our Docking/MDI visual updates.
First Look
Here’s the first look at the new visual updates:
This screenshot shows the default Aero look. Note how well it combines with our new theme updates for the native WPF menu and statusbar. More...