Friday, 3 October 2008 01:53 by
Bill Henning (Actipro)The latest maintenance release of Actipro WPF Studio v4.5.0471 includes several large updates to the PropertyGrid product, several small updates to other WPF Studio products, and a number of brand new QuickStarts for the Sample Browser.
PropertyGrid Features
Filters
The first new PropertyGrid feature is the ability to quickly and easily filter the items presented. We've included several built-in filters for string and boolean properties, as well as filter groups. String filters support everything from Equals to regular expressions and groups can be used to combine any number of filters using AND/OR logic.
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Shows the PropertyGrid before (left) and after (right) text is typed to filter out properties by name
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We designed the filters so that they can readily be used directly from XAML, including support for data binding. Custom filters can be used when the built-in filters are not enough.
Filters allow users to quickly find a specific item, or they can be used to permanently exclude items from being displayed.
A common use of filters is to provide a TextBox above the property grid. When the end user types in text, only the properties whose names contain the text are displayed. This is displayed in the screenshot above.
Read-Only State
We have also added a read-only state to the PropertyGrid, which is configured using the new IsReadOnly property. Using this new property, all the value editors in the PropertyGrid can be set to prevent changes.
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PropertyGrid with the global IsReadOnly flag set to true; note all values are disabled in this mode
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Memory Usage and Other Fixes
Several memory issues and other fixes found since the initial product release are also included in this release.
New Demos and QuickStarts
We've added five completely new demos and QuickStarts to this release, along with updating two of our existing QuickStarts with new functionality.
Docking & MDI Custom Docking Windows
We've had several requests to allow our DocumentWindow and ToolWindow controls to be inherited so that they can be defined as their own classes with separate XAML. There was a core WPF issue that prevented this in the past (styles wouldn't be applied to the inherited controls) however we've found a workaround for this issue and implemented it in build 471.
In addition, we've added a new QuickStart that shows exactly how to define custom DocumentWindow and ToolWindow classes and reuse them in a DockSite.
MonthCalendar Day Highlighting
Another request we've gotten from several customers is to be able to highlight certain days within our MonthCalendar control. In build 471, we show the implementation of a custom class that highlights certain days.
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The MonthCalendar control showing several types of highlighted days
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The same concept could be used to highlight holidays, birthdays, etc. in your own applications.
Enjoy the update!