We've been working hard on the new products and features being added for the WPF Controls 2012.1 version. It is still several weeks away but today I wanted to announce that for this new version, we'll be migrating all our controls to target .NET 4.0. .NET 4.0 client profile will be fully supported.
The WPF controls currently target .NET 3.5 SP1. Now that .NET 4.0 has been out for 2 years and the beta of the .NET 4.5 version is out in the wild, we felt it was a good time to make this move. This move has also been heavily requested by our customers.
Support for Visual Studio 2008 will no longer be available with these updates since that VS version doesn't work with .NET 4.0. Samples will only be distributed in Visual Studio 2010 format, which is also compatible with Visual Studio 11.
Some beneficial side effects of this move are:
- We've been able to remove code throughout various products that previously had to use reflection to access .NET 4.0 properties like text formatting mode, etc. (since we were targeting .NET 3.5 SP1, where they didn't exist) and replace that code with native .NET 4.0 object model code instead.
- Our Prism interop assembly that allows our Docking/MDI product to be easily integrated with Prism will only ship a Prism v4.x compatible assembly, instead of a Prism v2.2 one. Those of you who use Prism v4.x no longer will need to recompile our Codeplex source code for this interop assembly on your own.
- Our DataGrid interop assembly that provides themes and some other features for the MS DataGrid now directly references the .NET 4.0 DataGrid, instead of the WPF Toolkit version. No more recompiling of the Codeplex source code for this is necessary for .NET 4.0 customers.
We wanted to get this info out now so that you can prepare accordingly. Look for more info soon about what's coming to the WPF controls in version 2012.1.
