What We Accomplished

This quarter we issued a couple v2019.1 updates for our WPF controls with minor enhancements and bug fixes, all while continuing to plug away at polishing off the v2020.1 version and readying it for release. 

We released v2020.1 on Friday, right after the end of the quarter.  A detailed blog post will be up shortly that summarizes the enormous set of exciting new features.

What's Coming Next

With the large WPF Controls v2020.1 version now out, we'll be adding more enhancements over the coming weeks.  We'll also be taking a look back at items on our TODO list that have been backlogged while we worked on v2020.1.

Blog Post List

Product Releases

• WPF Controls v2019.1 Build 687 Maintenance Release
• WPF Controls v2019.1 Build 686 Maintenance Release

Control Product Development

• Automatic WPF Theme Switching to Match Windows Settings
• WPF Theme Designer – Sample UI Documents
• WPF Theme Designer - Color Palettes
• WPF Theme Designer - Introduction
• The New WPF Theme Generation System

What We Accomplished

This quarter we issued updates to our WPF and Universal Windows control sets.  These updates contained a lot of minor enhancements and bug fixes.

On the development side, we've been hard at work on the WPF 2020.1 version.  The focus of this version is on modernizing themes across native WPF controls as well as the Actipro controls.  We've already posted a lot about WindowChrome updates and more recently ShadowChrome.  We'll continue posting more about many other v2020.1 enhancements in the weeks ahead.

What's Coming Next

Our top development priority right now is wrapping up the WPF v2020.1 feature set.  We've built a way to dynamically generate themes based on various options you set.  This is something we'll dive into in future blog posts.  Let me tell you, it's really neat and we can add more customization options in the future. 

We've already run through and have improved our themes for nearly all native WPF controls and have started doing the same to Actipro controls.  Ribbon has probably received the most visual updates so far.  The updates allow it to look just like Office 2019, complete with new animations, and Ribbon also now takes advantage of new WindowChrome features.  Keep watching our blog for more info.

Back on the WinForms side of things, we almost have another big maintenance release about ready to go for those controls.  We just have some final testing before it's ready to be released.

Blog Post List

Product Releases

• WPF Controls v2019.1 Build 685 Maintenance Release
• UWP Controls 2020.1 Released
• WPF Controls v2019.1 Build 684 Maintenance Release

Control Product Development

• WPF Shadow Chrome
• WPF WindowChrome System Menu Customization
• WPF WindowChrome Title Bar Header Customization
• WPF WindowChrome Title Bar Merging
• WPF WindowChrome Title Bar Menu
• WPF WindowChrome Title Bar User Profile Button
• WPF WindowChrome Title Bar Back Button
• WPF WindowChrome Processing Overlays
• WPF WindowChrome Application Menu Overlays

What We Accomplished

Following the massive SyntaxEditor vNext updates for the WPF platform that were released at the end of May, this past quarter we completed work on similar SyntaxEditor updates for the UWP platform and released them.  Since then, we've been working on wrapping up SyntaxEditor vNext updates for the WinForms platform.  These WinForms SyntaxEditor updates will finally bring the newer WPF SyntaxEditor API to the WinForms version, so that all three platforms can be kept fully in sync moving forward.

We used the new 2019.1 version of our UWP SyntaxEditor in a large update for our free Code Writer app.  A WPF Controls maintenance release was also published.

What's Coming Next

The SyntaxEditor vNext updates for the WinForms platform are about code complete and are currently in beta testing.  If you would like to help beta test, please contact our support team.  We expect the final version to roll out in the next several weeks.

New WPF and UWP Controls maintenance releases should be out any day now.

Following all that, we will begin on new development in other areas.  We have a lot of plans on updating our WPF themes for the 2020.1 version.

Blog Post List

Product Releases

• WPF Controls v2019.1 Build 682 Maintenance Release
• UWP Controls 2019.1 Released
• Code Writer v4.1 Released
• Code Writer v4.0 Released

Control Product Development

• SyntaxEditor for Universal Windows vNext Beta Testers Wanted

What We Accomplished

In this quarter, we were proud to roll out our brand new company website and blog to better serve you. Both have beautiful, modern designs that focus on content, have subtle animations, and use responsive design to look great on any device. Best of all, they are very fast!

We rolled out large maintenance releases of our 2018.1 WPF, UWP, and Silverlight controls, and a new version of our free Code Writer app as well.

Behind the scenes, we’ve continued plugging away at the massive SyntaxEditor vNext project. This project is rewriting the internals of SyntaxEditor to be common across the WPF, UWP, and WinForms platforms, while adding a number of neat features along the way.

In this animation, you can see a new feature coming in vNext, which is multiple carets/selections. You can click like normal to place a caret, then Ctrl+click to add one or more additional carets. Here we are using the open line above edit action (Ctrl+Enter) to add blank lines above both carets, and then are typing. The typing appears on both lines.

What's Coming Next

The main focus now is wrapping up the SyntaxEditor vNext project and starting to get betas out. The WPF version is the closest to being code-complete. We are running through the remaining TODO items there, knocking them out each day. We expect to start asking for WPF SyntaxEditor vNext beta testers in the next several weeks. Watch our blog for news.

Blog Post List

Actipro Website and Blog

• The Actipro Blog Has Moved
• The New Actipro Software Website

Control Product Development

• SyntaxEditor vNext - Editor View Panes
• Color Picker Comparison Values

Product Releases

• Code Writer v3.3 Released
• WPF, UWP, and Silverlight v2018.1 Maintenance Releases

We rolled out our brand new modern company website a couple weeks ago, and the response has been fantastic.  As part of that rollout, we also updated the appearance of our blog to match our main web site.

Our blog was previously hosted using a third-party web app (the classic BlogEngine.NET) on a separate blog.actiprosoftware.com sub-domain.  While that web app has served us well, it was time to move on.

One thing we've wanted to do for a long time was eliminate the use of a third-party web app for the blog, and merge the blog right into our main company website.  I'm pleased to announce that today we’ve accomplished that goal. 

New Blog URL

Please update your bookmarks appropriately since the blog is now fully integrated into our company website and is found at this new URL:

https://www.actiprosoftware.com/blog

Benefits

The primary benefit of this change is that it’s now easier than ever for you to comment on blog posts.  Simply sign into your normal Actipro website user account and if you’ve performed the e-mail validation (you’ve already done this if you post in our discussion forums), you’re ready to post in the blog comments.  It’s a very seamless experience.

Another benefit is that the new integrated blog uses the same powerful comment editing mechanism as our forums.  Comments used to be limited to plain text in the old blog.  The new blog comment editor fully supports rich formatting, code snippets, etc.