Sneak Peek: Docking for WPF (Part 4 - RibbonWindow with Docking/MDI)

Here is a new screenshot of a demo showing a RibbonWindow that contains a Ribbon along with docking tool windows and tabbed MDI, all in the Office 2007 black theme.

VistaDocking

A RibbonWindow in Windows Vista that uses the Office 2007 black theme and has docking tool windows

As mentioned in earlier blog posts, Docking for WPF will be part of the WPF Studio v4.0 release, due in several weeks. Any customer who has an active WPF Studio subscription (all license purchases include free subscriptions) at the time of release will get this new product for free.

Bill, your timing could not have been better! I was just reviewing your Ribbon Control and found myself thinking it's great for my UI, but I have to get docking windows in there as well. I was frustrated because I thought I'd have to choose one vendor for docking windows and then choose ActiPro for the Ribbon. However, that obviously is not the case now! Your products just keep getting better and better. I'm looking forward to purchasing the new WPF suite once it includes docking windows. Again, keep kicking butt.

One more question, are you thinking about any WPF controls something along the line of an advanced FlowDocument Editor? I think a FlowDocument editor control that allows you to save the entire FlowDocument (**images included**) as a single FILE or Stream would be fantastic. I know you can currently do this with XPS but I need to do it with FlowDoc. Just curious.

Also, I love what you're doing with themes, transitions, effects, etc. It's so much nicer to use one vendor for all controls instead of having to use a different vendor for each control, etc.

Cheers

June 2, 2008 at 19:03

jon

June 3, 2008 at 12:18

Thanks for the comments Jon, much appreciated. We're very excited to get Docking and Gauge wrapped up and into the hands of our customers too. We're getting multiple requests daily for Docking at this point.

We currently don't have plans to do a flowdocument editor, but we will be working on SyntaxEditor for WPF again following the release of WPF Studio v4.0 though.

Bill Henning (Actipro)

June 5, 2008 at 15:54

Hi Bill,

Great to hear that WPF studio 4 is going to be out in a couple of days, right on time for development of our new major release

Do you have any release schedule ballpark date for SyntaxEditor for WPF? We will use syntaxeditor in our next major release of llblgen pro's designer, and as most of the stuff is likely wpf based, we would like to use a wpf based syntaxeditor as well

Frans Bouma

June 7, 2008 at 04:31

Hi Frans,

Sorry if there is a misunderstanding but the v4.0 release is still several weeks (not days) away. But we are getting closer each day to it as its completion is our top priority. We already have a number of WPF Studio customers working with the beta version too. It's too early to say when SyntaxEditor for WPF will be done. SyntaxEditor development will ramp up again right after v4.0 is out. We put it on hold temporarily so that we can devote our development time to getting v4.0 out the door.

June 7, 2008 at 10:29

Yes sorry I meant weeks, not days

Ok, so for safety, I think it's best if we start with SE 4.0 and not hold our breath for the WPF version. (although if it is released before the end of the year, we can use it).

However, using a winforms control inside a wpf UI is a bit of a pain, I'm told. But we'll see

June 7, 2008 at 15:40

We certainly will be working as fast as possible to get SyntaxEditor for WPF out since there is a lot of interest in it. Perhaps we even get some early public beta builds out with minimal features in certain areas just so people have something to work with.

But SE 4.0 for WinForms should work fine in WPF apps in the meantime. We use it in our internal documentation writing application (WPF-based) with the Web Add-on now and it works great.

June 8, 2008 at 15:17

Thanks Bill, that info was very helpful

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