We’ve been getting a lot of e-mails asking about what we’re currently working on, when new releases are planned, etc. So I’d like to give an update on our plans for the next couple months.
WPF Studio 2010.1
We’re working hard on WPF Studio 2010.1. Our plan is to have it out in the April or May 2010 timeframe at the latest. Here are some of the updates we have planned for it:
Target .NET 3.5 SP1
As mentioned in a previous blog post, WPF Studio 2010.1 will move to target .NET 3.5 SP1. This will enable us to take advantage of new features that aren’t available in .NET 3.0.
Source codebase move to VS 2010
All our source code for WPF Studio will be moved to VS 2010 projects.
VS 2010 sample projects
WPF Studio 2009.2 ships with VS 2008 projects that can be converted to VS 2010 format when they are opened in VS 2010. Our designer functionality in 2009.2 already has been designed to function in VS 2010 properly. However to make things easier for customers, we will ship VS 2010 and VS 2008 variations of the sample projects in WPF Studio 2010.1, thereby saving you from having to run the project conversion in VS.
New WPF control product
A brand new WPF control product is being developed that will ship with WPF Studio 2010.1. We’re pretty excited about it and will give some more information on it when we get closer to release.
Ribbon updates
We’re working on updates for the Ribbon control to make it look more like Office 2010. In addition, the glow effects in the title bar will be created with shader effects since the bitmap effects we previously used are no longer supported in .NET 4.0.
SyntaxEditor updates
The ability to create and support multiple highlighting style registries has been added. This means that you can have one registry set up for general code editing, another for console windows, etc.
Miscellaneous
Other miscellaneous updates will be included for various products.
Silverlight Studio 2010.1
We’re excited to finally be bringing to market some Silverlight controls. They will initially be released in a new Silverlight Studio 2010.1 bundle, due out when or soon after WPF Studio 2010.1 is released.
What’s included?
The first Silverlight Studio version will include a beta release of our SyntaxEditor control, and a Silverlight version of the new unnamed product that is being added in WPF Studio 2010.1. There also is a Silverlight Shared Library that has a bunch of helpful common components and controls.
Silverlight 3 or 4?
Right now our code is being developed for SL3, but we may switch to SL4 if it is released before Silverlight Studio is ready to go. This could add a small delay in our release date but we’d much rather support the latest and greatest, especially since SL4 will enable us to support some additional SyntaxEditor functionality in the future that we can’t do in SL3.
Building a product infrastructure
We’re currently working on building a product infrastructure for Silverlight that helps aid in code compatibility between Silverlight and WPF. Since this is the first time we’re getting into Silverlight, we’ve had to construct a new product licensing mechanism, a new control theming mechanism, and other infrastructure items needed to support a set of quality commercial controls.
We’ve been building a new Sample Browser for our Silverlight controls too, similar to our WPF Sample Browser. We’ll try and get some screenshots posted soon.
WPFpedia.com reimplementation
We have been planning a complete reimplementation of our wpfpedia.com reference guide site for a while now. It will become a completely separate web site from our main Actipro site and has been rebuilt from scratch using ASP MVC and the latest web technologies to provide the ideal place for you to go when trying to learn how to do something in WPF.
More news on this very soon!
Summary
As you can see, there are a lot of items on our plate right now but we’re chugging through them. 2010 is going to be an exciting time for us and our customers, especially with the new development tools like Visual Studio 2010 coming our way shortly.