Yesterday we started the closed beta testing for our Editors for WPF product. If you are a WPF Studio customer and would be interested in testing it, we’d love to get your feedback. Email us if you’d like to help.
Editors for WPF will be one of the primary additions for the next major version of WPF Studio. We currently are still finishing up some features while the beta test is in progress, however it’s looking great so far.
Built-in Editors
Our editors framework is really flexible and allows you to build your own part-based or masked editors. The product will ship with a number of predefined editor controls for editing certain types of data.
Here are the ones we currently have for the beta:
- Date/time
- Double
- Guid
- Int32
- Int32Rect
- Point
- Rect
- Size
- Vector
We also plan on adding some more such as:
- Color
- Duration
- IPAddress
- SolidColorBrush
- Thickness
- TimeSpan
- Version
Are there any others you’d like to see? If so, please post your ideas and we’ll get it on our TODO list.
The GUID Editor
One interesting implementation is an editor for Guid objects. Here is the GUID editor when there is no value:
Note the watermark indicating that there isn’t a value. If you click on the control to focus it, it transitions to this:
In that screenshot, dots show up indicating where characters can be typed. Alternatively you can click the green plus button to auto-generate a Guid value like this:
The checkbox is indicating that there is a value in place. If you uncheck it, the control resets back to the No GUID state displayed in the first screenshot.
This is a neat editor instance because it incorporates the use of a custom button that performs a task related to the editor’s value, namely generating a new value. Custom buttons or any other content can be inserted into an editor using our framework.
PropertyGrid Integration
Editors are great for standalone usage, however we’ve also designed them to be well matched for use in our PropertyGrid for WPF control.
|
A PropertyGrid control showing the use of multiple Editors controls
|
In the screenshot above (which is a demo that will be included with WPF Studio’s Editors) a PropertyGrid is making use of a number of editors from Editors for WPF to display and edit values. The RectangleBounds property is using the Rect editor implementation. The selected SkewX property is using a Double editor implementation that also has constraints on it such that the value must be between –10 and 10. The spinner knows to only scroll between values within that range.
I hope this gives you a good overview of how the Editors for WPF product can be used. We’re very excited to be in beta phase and closer to release of this great product.
As a reminder, any WPF Studio customers who have active subscriptions at the time of release will get this for free!