We're very close to having our new PropertyGrid for WPF product ready to go and we're confident you'll love it once you get your hands on it. We've added a lot of innovative features that aren't found in our competition.
More on these closer to release, but I'll review a couple things below.
Release Date
We're putting some final touches on the codebase today and early next week. We already have over 10 QuickStarts that show off various product features, and several others that we plan on doing, some possibly after the initial release. We also have to work on documentation.
So with all that mind and barring any last minute changes, we're going to target the first release of PropertyGrid for WPF sometime in the week of September 15th.
Anyone who has an active WPF Studio subscription at the time of release will be eligible to upgrade to get PropertyGrid for free! That's one of the great benefits of being a WPF Studio customer, instant free access to new products.
.NET 3.5 SP1 Virtualization
As you know, .NET 3.5 SP1 came out a couple weeks ago adding some nice new virtualization capabilities for native WPF controls. We wanted to ensure that PropertyGrid also took advantage of the new virtualization features and have designed it accordingly.
When PropertyGrid virtualization is enabled on machines running SP1, the control will use less memory and will have faster load times. The only downside is that scrolling will be slightly slower since it is generating containers on the fly instead of at initial load time.
Category Editors
One really interesting feature of the Actipro PropertyGrid for WPF is the ability to support custom category editors.
Category editors are a concept introduced in Expression Blend where you can group multiple properties into a custom UI that provides a friendlier layout. The properties processed by the category editor do not appear individually like normal.
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Two PropertyGrids side-by-side and operating on the same object, one with default editors and one with custom category editors
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The screenshot above shows one of our QuickStarts where both PropertyGrid controls are editing the same object. However the PropertyGrid on the right has a couple category editors that consumes several properties and provides an interesting UI for editing those properties.
As with the rest of the control, the UI can be fully customized and styled.