Several customers reported some issues with the updates made in Docking/MDI for the first 2010.2 build. One of the enhancements we made caused several side effects which were all related to the same issue. We’ve resolved the issue and have posted an important WPF Studio 2010.2 build 531 maintenance release you’ll want to grab. It’s available now on our site.
New features
The new build 531 also adds some neat new features to a couple products.
Gauge
One new feature added to Gauge is the ability to place text on pointer needles. We have options for how to orient the text too. It can move exactly with the needle, can always render horizontally, or can move with the needle but intelligently flip upside-down when appropriate so that the text continues to render right-side-up such as in this screenshot:
Linear gauges also get easy-to-use text pointer labels.
Both circular and linear gauges also receive new features for managing refresh rate, similar to an existing feature we have with our digital gauges.
This feature is useful when there is a high update rate of data sent to the gauge. The refresh rate will buffer the updates that appear in the UI to a designated refresh rate. So instead of having a gauge pointer flipping all over and being difficult to read, you can set it up to just update a couple times a second and it will animate much slower, thus making the gauge data easier to visually consume.
Another new feature added is the ability to render lowercase letters in the digital gauges via a new character casing option. Choose to force characters to lowercase, uppercase, or render text as-is.
SyntaxEditor
A great update to SyntaxEditor is the new indent provider service. This service can be registered on your language to tell the editor how to indent code when the Enter key is pressed. Options are no indent, block indent, or smart indent.
Previous builds of SyntaxEditor for WPF used no indent, but the default has now been made to block indent if no indent provider service is registered on a language. That means that when pressing Enter, text will move to the same indentation as the previous line.
Smart indent allows a language to programmatically indicate how to indent a line. This means in C# for instance, you can scan back to see if you are right after a { character and indent a tab stop if so.
Another new service is a basic interface for supporting the formatting of text ranges. Text formatting involves adjusting whitespace and symbols such as braces to make code more readable.
We’ve added some documentation on these new features and will be adding some samples of their usage hopefully in the next build.
Update on Silverlight Studio 2010.2
We are currently finishing up work on Silverlight Studio 2010.2. We hope to have it out even as early as next week.
The 2010.2 version will have the new Book control in Views, along with all the SyntaxEditor updates made in WPF Studio 2010.2 such as the new LL(*) Parser Framework, indent provider and text formatter services, the Web Languages Add-on, and more.