Actipro WPF Controls v2020.1 development is in progress, and the new version’s main goals are to modernize our UI control features/themes, and make theme customization much easier.

In our previous post, we took a look at a new mechanism in our primary WPF Controls samples app to quickly search for samples.

Today's post will focus on some infrastructure updates we've been working on to bring not only NuGet feeds, but also .NET Core builds of our WPF controls in v2020.1.

NuGet Package

Many customers have asked for NuGet package feeds of our WPF Control assemblies so they can reference the feeds in their applications and not have to manually update assembly references when moving to new versions.  By using NuGet feeds, the versions can be easily managed through Visual Studio's NuGet Package Manager.

We are still finishing it all up, but here's a preview of an Actipro WPF Controls metapackage (a NuGet package that includes other individual Actipro product packages) as seen in the NuGet Package Explorer app.

Our eventual plan is to publish the 20+ Actipro WPF Control packages to nuget.org so that it's simple to find and use them.

Before we get there and while doing final testing on this mechanism, we may start with a ZIP of our NuGet packages that you can download from your Actipro account and place in a private NuGet server to get started.

.NET Core Builds

As .NET Core gains momentum and popularity, we will be there with native .NET Core builds of our WPF Control products, starting in v2020.1.

While the traditional WPF Controls installer you download from our site will still only include .NET Framework versions of the assemblies (for now), as mentioned above, we will make a ZIP available with our NuGet packages.  These NuGet packages will target the traditional .NET Framework and also .NET Core 3.0.

Thus you'll be able to reference these NuGet packages in your .NET Core app projects to use pure .NET Core-based Actipro assemblies.

Summary

Both of these updates have been highly requested by our customers.  We recognize that adding them is delaying the release of v2020.1 a bit, but we want to make sure we get all of this right.

As far as timelines go, we still have some work left on finalizing the implementation of the above.  Part of this is moving to a new VS designer object model for the .NET Core variations of the WPF control designer functionality.  Once that effort is complete and we've completed some additional adjusting of our themes system based on alpha testing, we will ask for beta testers to participate in a closed beta.

v2020.1 is shaping up to be an enormous release.  The blog hasn't even really gotten into the new theme generation features yet, or the new Theme Designer application.  Watch for blog posts on those soon.

Post in the comments below with any questions or comments on the NuGet feeds and .NET Core builds.