Actipro Blog 2016 Q1 Posting Summary

What We Accomplished

In this quarter, we completed work on the major rewrite of our popular Docking/MDI product for WPF. The entire product was rewritten from the ground up to support next generation docking window features, all while maintaining a similar overall public API. In the new version, floating documents become full-featured secondary dock hosts that even support docked tool windows around them. This sort of thing is wonderful for end users with multiple monitors. Fast subtle animations are used throughout the product to give the interface a more vibrant feel. New layout properties and features are available that govern the size of containers (including min/max sizes), set initial floating window size, etc. Interop content support is improved even further. MVVM support is enhanced with many more bindable properties, default location determination for opening windows, and more. Download the 2016.1 version to take the best WPF docking window framework for a test drive.

And best of all, we didn't just make it for WPF. The entire product was written to be compatible with Universal Windows too! Download our Universal Windows controls to see a beta of the same docking window framework there.

The WPF Controls 2016.1 version added the Docking/MDI features described above, along with 14 new Office 2016-like themes that use accent colors, improved window chrome rendering, Metro themes built right into the Shared library, SyntaxEditor light/dark Metro image sets, and much more.

The Universal Windows Controls 2016.1 version was our first release for that platform. It was a port of our older WinRT/XAML Controls and included everything in those, along with the Docking/MDI beta.

Our Code Writer app also saw a new minor version, which will be the last one before a major new version for Windows 10 is released.

Finally, we have created a Slack team that enables you, our customers, to chat directly with us regarding new products and features.

What’s Coming Next

We're currently working on a custom TreeView control that will support more features than the native WPF TreeView. Our goal is to support the rich functionality of a control like the TreeView in Visual Studio's Solution Explorer tool window. It's being written from scratch for both WPF and Universal Windows using virtualization to keep it very speedy, and is capable of multi-selection, easy bring-into-view, etc. If you'd like to give us feedback on what you'd like to see in a new TreeView control, now is the time to get your feedback in! Either email our support address with your feedback or join our Slack discussion on the topic. Slack is preferred because we are sharing screenshots there and frequently ask for comments on feature areas. After this base control is completed, we'll move into some more new complex data presentation controls like multi-column trees.

We've started on the design of the updates for the Windows 10 version of our Code Writer app. We've got a UI design that looks promising and is a bit of of a UWP take on popular apps like VS Code and Sublime. We also have a Slack channel where we're discussing that, so please sign up to see where things are headed and get your feedback in.