We’ve just released WPF Studio 2009.1 build 504. This is a huge update and includes some major new functionality that we’ll talk about in more detail over the coming days. In this post though, let’s do a brief overview of some of the larger updates.
See our related forum announcement for exact details on what updates were made in each product.
 | DataGrid for WPF After a lot of user demand, we’ve added DataGrid functionality to WPF Studio. I’ve talked a lot about Actipro’s desire to embrace open source solutions as we move forward. Here is another instance. A lot of developers may not realize it but Microsoft has created an official WPF DataGrid that is open source and part of their CodePlex WPF Toolkit project. The DataGrid is slated to be part of .NET 4.0’s native controls as well. The DataGrid has many of the core features you’ll find in any grid offering. 
What we’ve done is made a number of extra enhancements and behaviors, and added them to an open source project of our own. This project also includes new Office themes that match the look of our other controls, along with updated system themes that look better than the default. Best of all, we’ve made the control take advantage of our ThemeManager so that you can switch themes on the fly. Our open source Contrib add-on is available on CodePlex at: We have taken things another step forward by offering an interop assembly that makes it simple to integrate our the masked and part-based editors in our Editors for WPF product with the DataGrid. Be sure to download the build 504 evaluation to see the new DataGrid functionality in action. |
 | SyntaxEditor for WPF MGrammar add-on gets asynchronous parsing, error reporting features The MGrammar add-on has been updated to use our parsing framework. Now when the Oslo Dataflow add-on is being used, as the end user types in the SyntaxEditor, a parse request is queued up and dispatched to a worker thread. The worker thread parses the entire document in the SyntaxEditor and builds an AST and list of syntax errors. These are returned back to the SyntaxEditor asynchronously, with no UI thread blocking. The MGrammar Integration sample has been updated to show an AST and error list that are built asynchronously as you type. Free ANTLR add-on added A popular request for years has been the ability to integrate the ANTLR parser with SyntaxEditor. With today’s release, this is now easy and can be done with very little code. The ANTLR add-on allows you to enable automated asynchronous parsing calls to the ANTLR parser, similar to the functionality described above for MGrammar. This previous blog post describes the functionality in detail. A new sample project has been added to demo this add-on. Completion list enhancements (auto-shrink, performance improvement) We’ve implemented another popular request item for completion lists: the ability to auto-shrink the visible list of completion items as the end user types. This functionality is found in Visual Studio when editing VB files. See this previous blog post for details and a series of screenshots showing the functionality. The performance of the completion list item matcher algorithms has been improved in a number of areas too. Hit testing This build adds the ability to perform detailed hit testing within SyntaxEditor. You simply pass it a Point and it returns an object that tells you everything you need to know about what is at that location. We’ve added a new QuickStart to show off the hit testing feature. |