A website is a very important piece of any business, as it often makes the first impression on customers and gives them a feel for your company and what products you offer.

At Actipro, we've worked for quite a while developing a brand new company website with a fresh, modern design that is built on the latest web technologies and performs very fast.

https://www.actiprosoftware.com

Without further ado, here's a peek at the new home page:

Goals

Responsive Design

A main goal was to ensure the web site was fully-browsable on any device, everything from large desktop screens to tablets and phones.  A lot of thought has been put into the site's responsive design, so that it's beautiful on any device.

Vibrant Colors

We've fully embraced the use of numerous colors in our website's theme, that all blend together in harmony.

Subtle Animations

Websites shouldn't simply be static content.  The use of animations can breathe life into a page and keep the end user's interest.  You'll find that we use a number of quick, subtle animations throughout the website.

Simplifying Presentation (or Reducing TL;DR)

Simplifying our product presentation was another goal.  For product pages, we reduced the amount of verbiage and increased the number of screenshots.  We've worked hard to relay interesting facts about our products, while enticing you to take the next step and download free evaluations to learn more.

Easy Navigation

A website should be easy to navigate.  Large buttons guide you through where to go, page by page.  Or use links at the header and footer to navigate to other sections of the site.

Maximum Performance

We wanted the new website to render much quicker than in the past.  And we achieved that.  This new website is built on the latest ASP Core platform and is extremely fast.

Matching Blog Design

The blog should match the design of the main company website, so we've updated this separate blog site's appearance to match thematically.

Summary

Now that the new website is out, we invite you to have a look around.  Please contact us if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for improvement.  We'd love to hear your feedback!

What We Accomplished

In this quarter, we continued enhancing the 2017.1 versions of our WPF Controls, Universal Windows Controls, and Silverlight Controls.  Docking/MDI gained many minor feature improvements.  Editors added better support for custom formats in numeric edit boxes, default values, and had other tweaks. Grids improved tree filtering, empty content display, column header taps, focus tracking, and added/updated several samples.  SyntaxEditor's .NET Languages Add-on added C# 6 and VB 14 syntax support, improved resolver logic for partial classes and base types, and more.  Numerous other updates were made across these and other products.

What’s Coming Next

We currently are working on finishing up the feature set for the 2017.2 versions.  Docking/MDI has a lot of updates related to floating windows, Editors adds a new AutoCompleteBox control, SyntaxEditor adds intra-line adornments (like the VS editor's Code Lens or Peek Definition features) and scrolling logic is refined, and the .NET Languages Add-on is getting an option to use Roslyn to load reflection information for referenced assemblies.

Most information on these new controls and features will be published soon.

We hope to roll v2017.2 out in the next several weeks.

Blog Post List

Control Product Releases

• WPF, UWP, and Silverlight v2017.1 Maintenance Releases
• WPF Controls v2017.1 Maintenance Release

What We Accomplished

In this quarter, we wrapped up all of the massive changes and improvements we've been working on for our new Grids and updated Editors products and rolled them out in the 2017.1 versions of our WPF Controls and Universal Windows Controls. 

The new Grids product contains a reimagined PropertyGrid control that is much faster and easier to use than our older WPF PropertyGrid control.  Grids also contains new highly-requested TreeListBox and TreeListView controls that are very fast and can reproduce control experiences like those seen in the Visual Studio Solution Explorer and more.  All of these new controls are available for WPF and UWP.

Our UWP Editors product was improved with numerous new controls and enhancements.  The entire product was also ported to WPF so that there is cross platform compatibility.  We did this since the new Editors are much more lightweight and in the future, any changes we make to one platform will easily roll into the other's codebase.

What’s Coming Next

Now that the new Grids product is officially out in the wild, we've been collecting feedback from customers and have been working on many enhancements centered around that feedback.  The first 2017.1 maintenance release is close to ready for release and has a number of those enhancements in place.  The maintenance release is also adding updates to our .NET Languages Add-on (WPF, UWP, Silverlight versions) to support C# 6 and VB 14 syntax, with full automated IntelliPrompt working for the new language features too.

We have started work on other SyntaxEditor updates, namely implementing intra-line adornment support.  This would allow you to add features like the VS editor's Code Lens or Peek Definition to SyntaxEditor.  We've started a public thread for these features and are beginning to look for beta testers.  Please write our support address if you'd like to help test this and ensure that our implementation meets your needs.

Beyond that, we plan on continuing adding minor enhancements to Grids, SyntaxEditor, Editors, and Docking/MDI over the coming weeks.

Blog Post List

Tips and a Special Offer

• How to Animate a WPF Standard MDI Window into Place
• Celebrating VS 2017 - A Free Universal Windows Controls Offer

Control Product Releases

• WPF, UWP, and Silverlight Controls v2017.1 Released
• WPF Controls v2016.1 Maintenance Release

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

• Grayscale Disabled Images in WPF
• SyntaxEditor Line Modification Mark Enhancements
• TreeListView - A Multi-Column Variant of TreeListBox

Control Product Releases

• WPF, UWP, and Silverlight v2016.1 Maintenance Releases

What We Accomplished

In this quarter, we published new maintenance releases of all our control products and released the 2016.1 WinForms Controls.  In terms of development, we've been working on a new Grids product (for WPF and UWP) that will initially consist of a TreeListBox, similar to the tree control found in the Visual Studio Solution Explorer.  That control is already in alpha testing to some customers.  While that testing is ongoing, we have made great progress on a TreeListView control, which is a multi-column variant of the TreeListBox control.  This control features everything you find in a standard ListView, along with all the features of TreeListBox, and additional ones like column reordering, frozen columns, etc.  We'll post more on this new control very soon.

What’s Coming Next

Development of the TreeListView control is currently the primary focus.  We hope to wrap that up for alpha testing in the next two or three weeks.  After that we have some other plans for derived controls that are based on the foundation provided by TreeListBox and TreeListView that we will be getting into.

Blog Post List

Control Product Development

• TreeListBox - New Features and Ready for Alpha Testing
• TreeListBox - Async Expansion, Inline Editing, and More
• TreeListBox - Progress and Checkable Nodes Sample

Control Product Releases

• WinForms Controls 2016.1 Released
• WPF, UWP, and Silverlight v2016.1 Maintenance Releases