This massive release adds our new Docking/MDI control library that adds Visual Studio-like docking window and MDI functionality to your Avalonia apps.  A commercial-quality docking window library for Avalonia like this has been heavily requested by customers, and we are proud to deliver it.

Alongside the addition of Docking/MDI is a host of other new controls and enhancements across the rest of our product line, and the migration to the recently-released Avalonia 11.3.0 version.

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

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Here’s a look at some of the new features.

Docking / MDI

The new control library allows end users to drag and dock windows wherever they please, and persist their layout customizations. It contains docking window and MDI capabilities found in popular IDEs, and extended functionality that you won't find anywhere else. The product is designed to fully support data-binding, allowing it to be used in MVVM applications.

Visual Studio-Like UI

The appearance and run-time behavior of window dragging, tabs, auto-hide popups, context menus, resize splitters, dock guides, etc. is all inspired by the popular Visual Studio user interface.

Docking Windows

Windows can be docked, attached (to create a tab group), floated, auto-hidden, or moved to an optional MDI area. Complex resizable hierarchies of tool and document windows can be created.

Tabbed MDI

In tabbed MDI each tab represents a document that can be reordered or moved between tab groups. Tabbed MDI documents can be floated into their own full-featured floating dock host.

Standard MDI

In Standard MDI each document is represented by a Window-like control that can be moved, resized, minimized, or maximized. Cascade and tile operations are built-in.

Auto-Hide

A tab group of tool windows that is docked can be unpinned to enter an auto-hide state. When in this state, tabs for each tool window appear on the outer edges of the layout.

Dock Guides

When dragging windows around, dock guides are displayed with the valid drop locations, and a drop target shows the resulting bounds. There is full control over which drop locations are allowed.

Switchers

Switchers appear when pressing keys like Ctrl+Tab and allow you to quickly navigate to an open docking window via the keyboard. They can also display descriptions about each docking window.

Fluid Animated Effects

Quick subtle animations are used throughout the product. Tab dragging uses smooth animation, dock guides and drop targets pop into place, and auto-hide popups slide in and out.

Other Features

Layout Persistence

The docking layout and its windows can be set up in XAML or programmatically-created. In addition, the end user's layout customizations can be saved and later restored between app sessions.

MVVM Support

Docking windows can be specified explicitly, or automatically generated by binding to a list of custom view models.

Reusable Controls

Several controls are included that can be reused stand-alone in your apps, such as one that behaves like a resizable window, and an advanced tab control that has tons of features not found in standard tab controls.

Drag and Drop Tabs

Drag and drop tabs to quickly reorder them within their container. Drag them to any other location within the dock site to dock them, or keep them floating above it.

Workspace Content

While most applications have tool windows that surround a workspace with a MDI area, any kind of custom content can be inserted into the workspace in place of a MDI area.

Tool Window Inner-Fill

When there is no workspace within a dock site, the tool window hierarchy fills the entire docking layout. This mode is useful for apps that want their UI to be made completely of tool windows.

Nested Dock Sites

Dock sites can be nested in other dock sites, such as in document and tool windows. For example, a document window in the outer dock site can have its own inner dock site that contains tool windows.

Linked Dock Sites

One or more dock sites can be linked with other dock sites in your app, including ones in separate top-level windows. When dock sites are linked, docking windows can be interactively dragged between them.

Miscellaneous

This product is fully-loaded with additional advanced features like tabbed MDI display states (normal, pinned, preview), contextual content in tabs / title bars, new tab buttons, tab tinting, tab flashing, tab overflow behaviors, window move/resize magnetism, context menu customization, and much more.

Bars

Main Menu

A new main menu control makes it easy to support a modern menu system in your views.

Tag Properties

Tag properties were added to all viewmodel classes in the Bars MVVM library to allow for storage of custom data.

MVVM Updates

Numerous viewmodels in the Bars MVVM library were enhanced with new options to control appearance and behavior.

Fundamentals

WindowControl

A new WindowControl class simulates the look and feel of a Window with a Control.

UserPrompt Resizing

User prompts now have a simple property that can configure the prompt to be resizable.

Themes

Immutable Resources

The hundreds of brushes defined for our themes are now created as immutable resources for optimal performance.

Native Control Theme Updates

All native control themes have been updated to correspond with changes made to Avalonia v11.3.0 themes.

Shared Library

Chromed Title Bar Context Menu

A default context menu has been added to chromed title bar.

Chromed Title Bar Rendering

Title bar caption buttons now render differently on Windows, Linux, and macOS to better match the native title bar appearance.

Window Title Bar Snap Guides

Our chromed window title bar on Windows system now supports non-client hit testing and works with Windows snap guides when hovering over the Maximize button.

Avalonia v11.3.0

The Actipro Avalonia Controls now require Avalonia v11.3.0 or later.  

This massive release contains our new Bars product with modern ribbon, toolbar, menu and related control implementations that allow you to replicate Office-like user interfaces, right in your Avalonia applications.  Numerous enhancements were made to add support for template-based icons in our controls.  And finally, the Actipro native control themes were updated to be compatible with Avalonia v11.2.

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

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Here’s a look at some of the new features.

Ribbons, ToolBars, Menus

Ribbon Variant Sizing

Ribbon consolidates all commands into a single location, which is easy to use and scales well, thereby providing fast access to all commands regardless of window size. The entire layout of child controls can be tailored to ensure the most important commands are prominently available. Through the use of variant layout phases, you can achieve nearly any dynamic layout that you find in Office.

Ribbon Classic and Simplified Layout Modes

Classic layout mode uses a taller ribbon with a combination of large buttons and multi-row groups of controls and is ideal for large applications with lots of commands. Whereas Simplified layout mode is a modern refinement that uses a single row of controls and supports overflow. Ribbon can instantly toggle between the two modes.

Color Galleries

Show color palettes using the many available gallery display options. Colors can be categorized, and color shades can be generated.

Other Galleries

Galleries can appear on ribbons or menus, and can custom render items to show anything from bullets or symbols to text styles.

Screen Tips

Screen tips are advanced tool tips with a standardized layout for bar controls, and intelligently display below the ribbon.

Key Tips

Key tips provide easy keyboard access to any control on the ribbon or in its popups, even on backstage.

Backstage

The ribbon File button's backstage consists of application-wide commands such as for file operations and other functionality like printing.

UI Density

The user interface can switch between compact (seen here), normal, and spacious densities. Spacious densities are more touch friendly.

Standalone Toolbars

A standalone toolbar control is flexible enough to be used in several contexts and can host any of the galleries or controls that are used in a ribbon. Overflowed controls display in a popup.

Complete MVVM Support

Optionally create the entire ribbon user interface via MVVM. An open-source companion MVVM library is available that provides a full set of view models and related UI bindings for all bar controls.

Icon Updates

Avalonia has several icon libraries available where the icons are implemented via an Object and IDataTemplate pair instead of via a single IImage. Using these sorts of icons in our Avalonia controls in the past was difficult due to some of our icon properties being declared as IImage.

We’ve added a new IconPresenter control that is now used in control templates throughout our products.  IconPresenter supports Object-based icon data and an IDataTemplate that can render that icon data.  This mechanism is customizable so that it can work with any third-party icon library.  All our controls have been updated to support these kinds of icons, while still supporting IImage-based icons out of the box.

Avalonia v11.2 Compatibility

The recent Avalonia 11.2 version made several breaking changes to their native control templates.  The free Actipro Themes for native Avalonia controls have been updated to adapt and be fully compatible with those changes.

This version upgrades all the Actipro controls and themes to target the recently-released Avalonia 11.1 version.

For customers who wish to continue targeting their applications with Avalonia v11.0 for now, please use the Actipro Avalonia UI Controls 24.1 version, as that targets Avalonia v11.0.

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

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A new Avalonia UI Controls release is now available that makes some minor updates to the 24.1 version of our controls, which targets Avalonia v11.0. 

With today's release of Avalonia v11.1, a new 24.2 version will be published soon that targets Avalonia v11.1.

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

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This version adds several great new controls and makes many updates across the Avalonia UI control product line.

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

Download Buy Now

Here’s a look at some of the new features.

Fundamentals

Settings

Most applications contain a window or view where end users can configure settings. Actipro now provides several controls for displaying grouped and optionally expandable card-based editors for settings that are presented in a consistent, easy-to-use way.

• Consistent Appearance - Cards have a uniform design, and related cards can be grouped together. Each setting card can optionally have an icon, header, description, and content.
• Card Contents - A setting card's content is generally an editor for the setting. The content may be left blank, and the card itself can be made into a clickable button.
• Flexible Editors - Each setting card can contain any kind of editor control. Switches, sliders, combo boxes, and text boxes are commonly-used editor controls.
• Expandable Sections - Some settings have numerous child settings. These indented settings may be hidden under expandable cards that animate the contents when opened.

Application settings have never looked so good!

Card

The new card control presents visually grouped information for a single subject, using optional cover, thumbnail, header, and footer sections.

Cards can optionally be actionable as well.

Segmented Bar

The new segmented bar control allows a user to select a single item with support for fluent animations when changing selection.

It can arrange items horizontally or vertically.

Info Bar

The new info bar control displays essential information to a user without disrupting the user flow.

Messages can display with optional severity, action, and more.

Circular Progressbar

The new circular progressbar control displays a ranged progress value using fluent animations. It is similar to a native linear progressbar, except that it renders the progress in a ring shape and shows the progress text within the ring.

An indeterminate state is supported for scenarios where no specific progress value can yet be determined.

Shared Library

Scrollable Overflow Presenter

The new scrollable overflow presenter control can be oriented horizontally or vertically and displays scroll buttons when its content overflows the available space.

Clicking a scroll button smoothly scrolls the content.

Themes

Toggle Switch Affinity

Toggle switches can now optionally arrange the knob/track on the right side of the control instead of the left, which is ideal when used in the new settings-related controls.

Avalonia

The minimum Avalonia UI dependency is updated from v11.0.5 to v11.0.7 and all native control themes should now be consistent with Avalonia UI’s theme updates through v11.0.10.