Easily Manage Task Queues Using the TaskBoard Control

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Thursday, April 23, 2015 at 11:55pm

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The 2015.1 versions of our WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT/XAML controls were released a couple weeks ago and in today's post I'd like to highlight one of the great new controls that were introduced in that version:  TaskBoard.

TaskBoard Overview

A task board consists of zero to many columns, each of which can contain zero to many cards.  Columns and cards can be dragged and reordered, using pleasing animations.  Let's see an example to give you a picture of how it all works.

In the demo below, we have a TaskBoard control that is being utilized for a task planning system, commonly used in project management to help organize the priorities of a team.  The columns represent task groupings, and the cards represent individual tasks.  Each column has a header and optional footer that surrounds the contained card items.

TaskBoard
In this sample, each column header specifies the task grouping name and the column footer contains an "Add a task" button.  The footer of the overall TaskBoard control contains an "Add a list" button, which shows at the end of the list of columns.

The entire UI of the task board can be fully customized.  The cards can show any custom content as well, or can vary content based on data template selectors.

The TaskBoard control is designed for MVVM usage and makes it easy to fully alter the appearance of the entire layout with properties for column/card spacing, padding, corner radius, etc.  Best of all, rich animations are used whenever dragging columns or cards.

TaskBoard also works great with touch input.  Use it to create task planning systems on large touchscreen displays.

Summary

The full source TaskBoard demo seen above is included in the sample projects that ship with our WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT/XAML controls, and is available for you to check out today.

Let us know what you think after you try it!

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WPF Controls 2015.1 Build 621 Released

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Thursday, April 23, 2015 at 3:03am

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WPF Controls 2015.1 build 621 has been released and is now available for download.  This build has several new minor features.

Due to a certain initialization bug that was located in the original 2015.1 release, it is highly recommended that customers who have downloaded 2015.1 build 620 upgrade to this new build.

See the announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

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SyntaxEditor - Find All Using EditorSearchView

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Friday, April 10, 2015 at 12:56pm

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In today's post, we'll show the optional Find All button that was recently added to the SyntaxEditor (WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT/XAML platforms) EditorSearchView control.

Feature Description

SyntaxEditor has always had the ability to perform "find all" searches programmatically, however we received feedback from numerous customers looking to add this to our EditorSearchView control so that their end users could also access it.

EditorSearchView

The EditorSearchView control seen above shows the new Find All button visible.  Note that it is not visible by default (the new EditorSearchView.IsFindAllButtonVisible property defaults to false) since unlike the other find and replace operations, there is no automatic UI change in the editor itself for a find all operation.  Instead, you need to display the results somehow, such as in a find results list.

FindResults

This screenshot shows an example find results list.  The full source code for this sort of setup is included in the samples that come with SyntaxEditor.

Summary

Providing the ability for your app's end users to find all instances of search text is certainly a handy addition.

The features described above are available in our latest WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT/XAML control versions and are available for use.

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SyntaxEditor - Move Selected Lines Up/Down

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Monday, April 6, 2015 at 7:00pm

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In today's post I'd like to show a new feature that was recently added to SyntaxEditor (WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT/XAML platforms): move selected lines up or down.

Feature Description

Moving a range of selected lines from one place to another is a very common task in any text editor.  Of course this can be accomplished by cutting and pasting the selection around.  But for small adjustments to the location of several lines, the ability to simply move the lines is a valued feature.

We've added the ability to move selected lines up and down via the Alt+Up and Alt+Down keys respectively.  Let's see a couple examples of it in action.

MoveSelectedLinesUpDown

In this sample, I selected the lines that contain the AnotherMethod method.  Then I pressed Alt+Up several times to move the method above the Bar method.  I then pressed Alt+Down to move the lines back down to their original position.

MoveSelectedLinesUpDown2

In this second sample, I had a comment that wasn't in the right place and I wanted to move it up.  I just put the caret on the line and pressed Alt+Up a couple times to move it back to the right spot above the color property declaration.

Summary

The ability to move selected lines up and down is a real productivity enhancer when doing text editing.

The features described above are available in our latest WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT/XAML control versions and are available for use.

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WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT/XAML v2015.1 Released

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Friday, April 3, 2015 at 2:31am

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The 2015.1 versions of our WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT/XAML controls have been released and are now available for download.

Major new features are described below.  See the announcement posts for the large detailed list of enhancements and updates, including many items not listed below:

ProductHeadingWinRTBarCodes

Our Bar Codes product has been ported to the WinRT XAML platform.  This product, which already exists on WPF and Silverlight, allows your apps to render vector-based bar codes using many common 2D and linear bar code symbologies.

BarCodes

A full set of demos and QuickStarts are included to help you get going.

ProductHeadingWPFDocking

The interop assembly that makes it easy to use Docking/MDI with the Prism framework has been updated to reference the latest Prism v5.0.

DockingMetro

We've made numerous layout and performance updates to further improve the product. 

We also have been working hard on building a completely new internal engine for the Docking/MDI product, which will be available sometime later this year.  Keep an eye on our blog for posts detailing the advanced features that are coming with those updates.

ProductHeadingWinRTEditors

All of our edit box controls in the WinRT Editors now have an IsEditable property.  When set to false, the edit box behaves more like a ComboBox, while still retaining the rich popups that make the editors unique.  This is an ideal option for apps whose primary mode of interaction is expected to be touch.

ColorEditBoxNoAlpha

The CornerRadiusEditBox, PointEditBox, RectEditBox, SizeEditBox, and ThicknessEditBox controls have been updated to support text parsing one and/or two number entries where appropriate, which is useful for easy uniform value entry.

ThicknessEditBox

In the above ThicknessEditBox, a 2 is typed and then Enter is pressed.  The value is converted to a uniform thickness of 2.

A ValueChanged event has been added to all edit boxes, which fires when a value change is committed.

Finally, edit box padding has been adjusted so that more content is visible in the same amount of space.

ProductHeadingWPFGauge

A new DigitalGauge.CharacterSegmentThickness property allows for segment thickness adjustments.  This gives you even finer control over the presentation of your digital characters.

DigitGaugeSegmentThickness

We've enhanced the 'Linear Gauge Rolling Scale' QuickStart with a new infinite rolling scale example for navigation headings.

HeadingGauge

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The EditorSearchView control now supports an optional "Find All" button.

EditorSearchView

The RTF export logic has been updated to support extended ASCII characters.

The free CSS language definition now supports the syntax highlighting of media queries.

We've dramatically improved the speed of large completion list display.

Several other performance improvements have been made, such as optimized the scenarios for which the TokenTagger raises its TagsChanged event, and refining of the automatic outlining update logic.

In the WinRT version, we added the SyntaxEditor.AreSelectionGrippersEnabled property, which determines whether the selection grippers show after touch within a view.

.NET Languages Add-on

The C# parser has been improved to recover better when encountering open block statements so that its AST node structure remains better in tact.

DotNetPropertyAccessor

The IntelliPrompt quick info for properties now includes accessors, making it possible to see whether a property is read-only.

Python Language Add-on

The Python language has received an enormous amount of updates, that in sum really improve the entire automated IntelliPrompt feature set.

PythonAddon

Check out all these enhancements:

  • Added IntelliPrompt for private members and updated the completion list to have Public and All filter tabs.
  • Added reflection data for private methods/fields of built-in primitive types.
  • Added IntelliPrompt for built-in exception types.
  • Improved IntelliPrompt for numerous built-in modules.
  • Greatly improved IntelliPrompt for package and module imports.
  • Improved IntelliPrompt for function parameters by examining available assert statement isinstance calls.
  • Added IntelliPrompt for static fields on classes.
  • Improved the resolution of base types for classes.
  • Added the optional IResolver.UnknownReturnTypeReferenceCallback callback that can be used to provide return type references for unknown types.
  • Updated the resolver to recognize where 'cls()' in a class method can create a new instance of the related class.
  • Updated the IntelliPrompt completion list to filter unmatched items.
  • Updated the IntelliPrompt docstring display to retain presentation of line feeds.

ProductHeadingGenericViews

The Views product has a new TaskBoard control added, available in all three (WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT) platforms.  TaskBoard can be used to create a board of reorderable columns and cards.  All of the drags use smooth animations to give you the feel that you are really interacting with the object.

RepairShopScheduling

The first full-source sample that comes with the control is a Repair Shop Scheduling demo, which shows how a TaskBoard can be used to interactively schedule work to resources, such as employees. TaskBoard excels at providing a visual way of representing work/tasks (displayed as cards) within a queue of some sort (displayed as a column).

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The second sample is a Task Planning demo, which shows how a TaskBoard can visually organize a project's tasks.

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We've added another new primitive SemiEllipse shape, which renders half of an ellipse.

SemiEllipseShape

The existing Triangle shape has a new IsClosed property that when set to false will create a triangle with only two of the sides rendered.

TriangleShape

Finally, in the WPF Shared Library, we added GradientBrushSlider.CanAddStops and CanRemoveStops properties that determine whether stops can be added and removed from a GradientBrushSlider.

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