Windows Workflow Designer SyntaxEditor Integration Updates

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Tuesday, April 22, 2014 at 7:07pm

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Last year, we created a sample for showing how a hosted Windows Workflow Designer instance could be integrated with Actipro WPF controls within a custom WPF application to provide a very elegant interface for end users. 

We have continued enhancing it and here's what it currently looks like:

WorkflowDesigner

Our Docking/MDI product is used to provide the tool window and multiple document interface.  Our SyntaxEditor code editor control, in single line edit mode, is injected as a custom expression editor.  When you combine SyntaxEditor with our .NET Languages Add-on, you are able to have it support powerful IntelliPrompt completion lists.  For instance, in the screenshot above, you can see the itemCount variable is showing up in the completion list since it was declared below.

In recent updates, we've:

  • Updated App.OnStartup code to theme native WPF controls using Actipro themes.
  • Added a Menu above the designer with options for closing the window, and toggling the tool window visibility.
  • Added a custom completion ListBox implementation to work around issue where ListBoxItem would steal focus on click and Workflow Designer thought that it then had to close the expression editor.

When you put it all together, it's very easy to integrate Actipro WPF controls with rehosted Windows Workflow Designer instances in your applications.  It only takes a few minutes to get up and running, and once you do, the result is well worth the time.

Summary

If you rehost the Windows Workflow Designer in your WPF apps and would like our example, please contact us and we'll be happy to share it with you!

For those customers who downloaded either of the prior versions, this update is at the same URL as before.

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JSON Language Coming to WinForms SyntaxEditor

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Tuesday, April 8, 2014 at 2:07pm

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We are adding a JSON language implementation to the WinForms SyntaxEditor samples for the next maintenance release.

Features

JSON is a lightweight data-interchange format that is a subset of JavaScript syntax, and is commonly used with many web technologies.  With the new syntax language, you'll be able to provide a great editor/viewer for JSON data.  Here's a screenshot:

JSONWinForms

The JSON syntax language has these features:

  • Syntax highlighting
  • Automatic code outlining
  • Smart indent
  • Delimiter (bracket) highlighting

Summary

This new syntax language example will be included in the next WinForms Controls maintenance release.

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Actipro Blog 2014 Q1 Posting Summary

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Tuesday, April 1, 2014 at 4:36pm

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What We Accomplished

In this quarter we published the 2014.1 versions of our WPF, Silverlight, WinRT/XAML, and WinForms controls.  These versions included a lot of new controls and feature enhancements for our existing controls.  Check out the release posts for more detail.

Our free Code Writer Windows Store app had a couple releases that added context menus, new file types like JSON, many find/replace improvements, and much more.

Blog Post List

Control Product Development

Control Product Releases

Code Writer App