WPF Controls v2016.1 Maintenance Release

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Thursday, December 15, 2016 at 1:15am

BlogPostBanner-WPF16.1.0635

Today we published a WPF Controls maintenance release v2016.1 build 635.  The updates are described in detail in this post.  It is highly recommended that you download this maintenance release since it fixes several issues that popped up with the Docking/MDI product and makes several other minor enhancements as well.

We are now at a stage where we are about to start prepping our codebases for the upcoming 2017.1 version.  Over the past few months, we've been working on an array of new and revised controls for that version, and will begin merging all that in over the coming weeks.  Look for a beta testing request announcement in very early 2017. 

Everyone, please have a wonderful holiday season and happy new year!

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WPF, UWP, and Silverlight v2016.1 Maintenance Releases

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro) - 2 comments
Friday, November 18, 2016 at 3:33pm

Maintenance16.1.BlogPostBanner

Very large maintenance releases of our v2016.1 WPF, Universal Windows, and Silverlight controls have been released and are now available for download.  While there are an enormous number of minor updates and bug fixes made across the various UI control product range, the following lists the major updates that were made.

Visual Studio 2017 Support

These Actipro maintenance releases update our UI controls to support the Visual Studio 2017 RC version that was released on Wednesday.  Congratulations to the Microsoft teams involved in delivering the next major version of our favorite IDE!

ProductHeadingGenericDocking

A new event has been added that is raised when dragging docking windows over a drop target.  Handle this event to specify that certain dock guides should be hidden that normally would be visible.

DockingDockGuides

A new property is available to prevent floating dock hosts that contain MDI from showing in the Windows taskbar.  (WPF only)

ProductHeadingUWPEditors

A new Calculator control has been added that provides a familiar calculator interface to interactively calculate numeric values.  A new PickerKind property is available on DoubleEditBox and Int32EditBox to allow for optional usage of the calculator in the popup picker.

DoubleEditBoxOpenedCalculator   TimeSpanEditBoxOpened

New edit box and picker controls have been added for the Int16, Int64, Single, and TimeSpan types.

A new property has been added that determines the scenarios (e.g Enter key press, etc.) in which a value commits when editing in an edit box.

A new property has been added that determines the wrapping behavior used when spinning past a minimum or maximum value in the active part in an edit box.

Added the DoubleEditBox.IsNaNAllowed, IsNegativeInfinityAllowed, and IsPositiveInfinityAllowed properties, which allow entry of those related values.

DoubleEditBoxNaN

Improved Int32EditBox to support hexadecimal formats.

Improved GuidEditBox to support multiple formats.

GuidEditBox

Added UI automation peers for numerous controls.

ProductHeadingWPFEditors

The MaskedTextBox control added a default context menu and the gradient brush editor added a Remove Stop button.

BrushEditBox

ProductHeadingGenericGrids

The TreeListBox control and its derivatives added a powerful data filtering mechanism that uses string, boolean, and predicate-based logic to filter items.

TreeListBoxFiltering

A new sample that demonstrates filtering was also added.

ProductHeadingGenericSyntaxEditor

Added the ZoomLevelIncrement property that controls the mouse wheel zoom step amount.

Added several UI automation peers for internal SyntaxEditor components.

CompletionListCentered

Improved the IntelliPrompt completion list to try and keep the item matched by typing scrolled to the middle.

ProductHeadingGenericShared

Added a UI automation peer for the RadialSlider control.

RadialSlider

Updated the RadialSlider control to support more keyboard shortcuts.

Summary

All products received numerous other minor enhancements and bug fixes.  See the announcement posts for the detailed list of enhancements and updates:

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Actipro Blog 2016 Q3 Posting Summary

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro) - 2 comments
Monday, October 3, 2016 at 1:46pm

BlogSummaryBlogPostBanner

What We Accomplished

In this quarter, we published new maintenance releases of our WPF, UWP, and Silverlight control products.  SyntaxEditor received numerous updates like a much-improved system for tracking line modification marks that works just like Visual Studio's (including showing reverted changes), a JSON text formatter, ability to merge new text changes into previous ones, and more.  Docking/MDI received many new features and bug fixes and the new build is a recommended update if you using the 2016.1 version.  The Shared Library added support for grayscale images on disabled controls.  But most importantly, we added an alpha build of our upcoming Grids product containing previews of our TreeListBox and TreeListView controls.  We've discussed these in several blog posts around the middle of the year.

What’s Coming Next

The past couple months we've focused on finalizing the TreeListBox and TreeListView controls and have been busy reimplementing our PropertyGrid control to be based on TreeListView.  That work is mostly completed at this point.  The new PropertyGrid we're making harnesses virtualization and is lightning fast.  It's also extremely customizable, making it easier than ever to make custom property value editors or even control which properties show up in the PropertyGrid.  We will be officially launching this new PropertyGrid control in a Grids product with the TreeListBox/TreeListView controls in early 2017 but might post a preview build of the new PropertyGrid in late 2016. 

We also have been working on backporting our UWP Editors product to WPF.  The editors found in that newer design are a bit simpler in nature (much lighter-weight in terms of UI elements) and very performant, while still providing the best features found in the current WPF Editors.  We are preparing these new and updated Editors to also launch in early 2017, alongside the new Grids product.  They will be ready for easy usage within the new PropertyGrid as well.

If you have any interest in helping test some of these new controls, please write our support address or sign up for our Slack team.

Blog Post List

Control Product Development

Control Product Releases

Grayscale Disabled Images in WPF

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Wednesday, August 31, 2016 at 1:25pm

PostBannerWPFControlsDevNotes

The most recent 2016.1 release of our WPF Controls added a new DynamicImage control.  This is a drop-in replacement for Image that will auto-grayscale the image content when the control is disabled.

Grayscale Images in Disabled Ribbon Buttons

Ribbon buttons have all been updated to automatically grayscale their images when they are disabled.

RibbonDisabledButtons

The left ribbon has enabled buttons and the right ribbon has several disabled buttons

Grayscale Images in Disabled ToolBar Buttons

ToolBar buttons (if our native control themes are applied) have also all been updated to automatically grayscale their images when they are disabled.

ToolBarDisabledButtons

The left toolbar has enabled buttons and the right toolbar has several disabled buttons

Summary

In the past, the above disabled buttons would show their images with some transparency but would retain the color.  Having images auto-switch to grayscale ensures that they truly reflect a disabled state.

These features are in the latest 2016.1 maintenance release, available now.

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SyntaxEditor Line Modification Mark Enhancements

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro) - 4 comments
Thursday, August 25, 2016 at 6:57pm

PostBannerSyntaxEditorDevNotes

The latest maintenance releases of our v2016.1 WPF, Universal Windows, and Silverlight controls had some major work done on SyntaxEditor's line modification marks feature.  In fact, its internal logic was completely rewritten and improved.

Overview

Line modification marks use colored bars in the selection margin to tell the end user whether changes have occurred on the line, and whether those changes have been saved.

This animation shows this feature in action:

SyntaxEditorLineModificationMarks

New changes will turn the marks yellow to reflect that those lines are “dirty” (unsaved).  If you then "save" the document (which I do above after typing on two lines), the marks turn green to indicate they are now saved.

While the yellow and green marks were present in older versions, there were some bugs that could occur with their tracking over the course of multiple text changes.  Those bugs have been fixed in this latest maintenance release.

In addition we also have added orange marks, that occur when you undo past the save point.  They show anything that is different from what was saved but is not different from the document when it was originally opened.

Summary

These great new features match exactly with what is in Visual Studio and are wonderful for end users.  Grab the latest 2016.1 builds to add them to your own apps!

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