The Actipro Blog

In a recent blog post, we mentioned that WinForms product updates were in progress.  I'd like to get into some more detail on what is to be expected from these updates.

Update Overview

Creation of WinForms Studio 2012.1

The next major WinForms controls release that we are working on restructures the WinForms control products to be similar to our WPF controls.  There will be a new WinForms Studio suite option that provides discounts over purchasing controls individually. 

UIStudio is being split up into three individual products:  Bars, Docking/MDI, and Navigation.  All of these separate products will be available in the WinForms Studio suite or individually.

The WinUICore and Shared assemblies have been merged into a single Shared assembly.

Finally, all products will have the same version number, which for the first version will be 2012.1.

Migration to .NET 3.5 and VS 2010 Projects

We've wanted to migrate to VS 2010 projects for the source and samples for a while now.  WinForms Studio 2012.1 will feature source built from VS 2010 projects and samples available in VS 2010 and 2008.

.NET 3.5/4.0 Client Profile Support

A common feature request over the past couple years has been for us to decouple the control designer functionality from the product assemblies so that "client profile" setups in .NET 3.5 or 4.0 can be used.

For WinForms Studio 2012.1, we have removed references to System.Design.dll from the product assemblies and have moved all designer functionality out to separate Design assemblies instead.

Restructuring of Internal Processes

All of our WPF and Silverlight controls are managed, built, and deployed using the same sort of scripts and tools.  This allows us to share code and make updates much faster.

For a long time now we've wanted to get our older WinForms controls on the same configuration.  That way, our products for all three platforms can be maintained internally by us in the same fashion. 

To accomplish this, internally we have:

• Created a source code folder structure that closely mimics our WPF/Silverlight source code folder structures.
• Updated all product licensing to use the same mechanism found in WPF Studio.
• Created a new Sample Browser application that is used to browse all WinForms product samples and product release histories.
• Converted product documentation to use our newer documentation format and build tools used in WPF/Silverlight.
• Merged all product documentation into a single help file like in WPF/Silverlight
• Created a new build process based on the WPF Studio build process.
• Created a new installer based on the WPF Studio installer.
• Other more minor updates.

Beta Testers Wanted

We're excited to be getting the updates listed above completed and out into your hands.  We are already well on our way towards doing so.

I'd like to take this opportunity to ask for beta testers to work with the new version once a beta is ready.  We hope to have a beta ready some time in the next couple weeks.

Please write us if you are an existing WinForms control customer and would like to be a part of our beta test.

We'll post more soon!

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

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...

What We Accomplished

In this quarter, we released new 2011.1 versions of WPF Studio and Silverlight Studio.  WPF Studio got a new QR Code 2D bar code, MVVM and Prism support for Docking/MDI, and new Calculator, Rating, and FanPanel controls.  Silverlight Studio got new Bar Code and Wizard products, along with Rating and FanPanel controls.

SyntaxEditor in both WPF and Silverlight received a ton of new updates.  Our LL(*) Parser Framework (used to build text parsers) now supports typed AST node creation, it got numerous new callback and error handling features, the Language Designer can now code generate AST node types, and .NET 4 text rendering enhancements were added.

The first version of the SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on was launched for both WPF and Silverlight, which provides syntax highlighting, parsing, AST generation, syntax error reporting, and automatic outlining for C# and VB when editing in SyntaxEditor.

We launched a large update to our Icons Essentials product that brings the total number of icons up to over 30,000 images.  We added a new Icons Elements product that lets you build your own customized icons by combining the elements with other existing icons to give them new meaning.

What’s Coming Next

We’re currently working on numerous enhancements for our Docking/MDI product.  We’ve also started on a new product that will provide themes for native controls that match themes for our custom controls.  This has been highly requested by our customers.

Finally we’re continuing to work very hard to build our next generation SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on.  Our goal with the add-on is to get automated IntelliPrompt starting to function in the coming weeks while editing C# and VB.

Blog Post List

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

We’ve made some more enhancements to the XML syntax language in our SyntaxEditor Web Languages Add-on, related to the automated IntelliPrompt completion list display. 

Our XML syntax language allows you to point it to an XSD schema and it will automatically show IntelliPrompt popups based on the schema data.  It’s really very slick and requires almost no work on your end to get going.

The updates described here apply to both the Windows Forms version of the add-on as well as the WPF version of the add-on.  More...

We’ve just posted a new maintenance release for our WinForms controls.  The release includes an updated Shared library along with various enhancements to SyntaxEditor and its add-ons.

The detailed list of changes are available in this forum post.

SyntaxEditor Control

A free new Ruby language definition is now included in the samples, and several minor tweaks and fixes were made.

Web Languages Add-on

Major improvements were made to support xs:any in automated IntelliPrompt.

.NET Languages Add-on

Numerous enhancements to C# and VB automated IntelliPrompt were made, particularly in the areas of implicitly-typed variables in a C# foreach statement, generic methods, and delegates.

As mentioned in one of our previous posts, we’ve been working on a port of our SyntaxEditor Web Languages Add-on from WinForms to the WPF version of SyntaxEditor.  We’re finishing up some last features on it before it will be ready to launch alongside WPF Studio 2010.2 in the coming weeks.

The advanced XML syntax language implementation in the add-on allows you to specify XML schemas to use for validation and to drive automated IntelliPrompt for the end user.  In the previous post on the subject we showed how to create an XHTML editor in a few lines of code with automated IntelliPrompt popups.

One feature we just implemented was the ability to properly support xs:any nodes defined in the XML schemas.  xs:any allows a schema to indicate that elements from any, other, or specific namespaces can be included as content within another element.

Best of all, we ported this new functionality back to the WinForms Web Languages Add-on too!

Let’s see an example…

Here is the WPF SyntaxEditor showing an XSLT document loaded.  The XSLT is doing a transform to HTML.  In the screenshot the mouse is over the xsl:value-of element, showing a quick info tip.  Now let’s start typing a new start tag…  More...

We’ve just sent out our July 2010 newsletter to subscribers and have posted it online as well in case you are not a subscriber.

You can view the newsletter online via this link:

• View newsletter

We list our development plan for the next several months at the end of the newsletter in its What’s next? section.

We’ve just released new SyntaxEditor for WinForms and UIStudio for WinForms maintenance releases the other day.  The new SyntaxEditor build has numerous functionality updates, adds three new sample languages (C, C++, and RTF), and improves the .NET Language Add-on’s automated IntelliPrompt in Visual Basic.  Enjoy!