Yesterday we announced that a new Metro Light theme is coming to our WinForms Controls in the 2014.1 version.  This new theme was modeled after Visual Studio 2013's appearance and helps give your app a sleeker look.

Differences in Auto-Hide Tab Behavior

In the newer Visual Studio versions, auto-hidden tool windows are represented by a UI element that no longer looks like a tab.  Instead, the "tab" contains the tool window's name with a thick line underneath. 

In this screenshot, you can see the mouse hovering over the Events auto-hide tab:

Another change in Visual Studio is that hovering over the tab no longer automatically shows the tool window in a flyout.  Users must now click to display the flyout.

Our DockManager already has a AutoHideShowOnMouseHover property that can be set to false to achieve that sort of behavior.  For the 2014.1 version, we have enhanced it further.  If the property is false, and a tool window's auto-hide tab is clicked while the related tool window flyout is displayed, the flyout will now toggle closed.  This achieves similar functionality to how Visual Studio 2013 works.

Summary

These additions to give your WinForms app a fresh new Metro look will be available in the 2014.1 version of our WinForms Controls.

We've had metro themes in our WPF control products for over a year now and recently announced that they are getting some very nice updates for their 2014.1, with a number of refinements and enhancements.

Today I'd like to announce that a Metro Light theme is coming to our WinForms Controls as well!  This new theme gives your WinForms apps a Visual Studio 2013-like appearance.

Theme Description

First, we've added an additional option to the WindowsColorSchemeType that is called MetroLight and uses a flat color scheme similar to Visual Studio 2013's look.

Next, we created brand new renderers for our Bars, Docking/MDI, and Navigation products that draw the controls using the Metro appearance.  SyntaxEditor and Wizard already look good in Metro Light with their existing renderers.

Here's the Bar Controls demo, showing off the new theme:

Notice how the entire window has a nice flat appearance and subtle touches like the dotted gripper title bars are included.

Summary

This great theme addition to give your WinForms app a fresh new Metro look will be available in the 2014.1 version of our WinForms Controls.

The past couple days, we've been working on enhancing our popular Metro Themes, mostly focusing on refinements and improvements to their use in our Docking/MDI product.

Our Metro Light, White, and Dark themes have been available since v2012.2 and not only theme the Actipro controls you use in your projects, but also can theme all the native WPF controls.  This allows your entire app to mesh together cleanly with a polished, professional appearance.

Theme Updates

Let's dive in and take a look at some of the updates that are coming.  First, here's a screenshot of our main Docking/MDI demo with the updated Metro Light theme:

Improvements include:

• Lighter dock site background that blends better with the window background.
• Subtle outline borders around the tabbed MDI and tool window containers.
• Tool window container title bars are no longer as in-your-face when not focused.
• Tool window container title bars now have a dotted region that help relay that they are grippable.
• New auto-hidden tool window tab appearance that is more like Visual Studio 2013.
• Tool window tab images hidden by default in Metro themes (but can be toggled back via a new option).
• Slightly lighter control backgrounds in Metro Dark theme.

Here's the same window in our Metro Dark theme:

Summary

Our feature rich Docking/MDI product, combined with our enhanced Metro themes, really provide sleek and clean docking window functionality for your WPF apps.  You won't beat the attention to detail that our themes provide.

These new features will be available in the 2014.1 version of Docking/MDI.

One feature that has been requested by a number of customers for our Docking/MDI product is to be notified of when a tool window that is auto-hidden flies out or back in, such as the Error List tool window in the screenshot below:

We just completed adding two new events to DockSite named WindowAutoHidePopupOpened and WindowAutoHidePopupClosed.  Each even passes an event args that specifies which tool window is being opened or closed.

These new features will be available in the 2014.1 version of Docking/MDI.

WPF Controls 2013.2 build 592 has been released and is now available for download.  This build focuses on numerous enhancements and bug fixes.  While many updates were made, major ones are listed below.

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

• Added the ability to alter the label positioning mode algorithm for a series.

• Improved support for high DPI scenarios.
• Improved support for highlighting tabs when interop controls get focus.

• Added support for the Metro Dark theme.

• Added a new Property Dialog QuickStart that shows how to display a dialog from a property editor.

• Added the ability to edit multiple lines of text at the same time when block selection is active.
• Added incremental search features.
• Added the ability to highlight search match results within a view.
• Added support for alpha-blended foreground/background style colors.
• .NET Languages Add-on - Added a 'deprecated' quick info note on types/members flagged as Obsolete.

• Improved WindowChrome (and RibbonWindow) rendering in various scenarios.