Today I'd like to take some time to take a glimpse at an excellent product that is being constructed by Patterson Consulting, one of our long-time customers.  This application really shows off what kind of top-notch user interfaces you can create with Actipro's WPF controls and themes.

Actipro Product and Feature Usage

Test Design Studio is currently written in WinForms and utilizes Actipro's WinForms controls.  The screenshot above shows their next major version, which is a WPF rewrite of the application with an updated appearance and new features. 

Our Docking/MDI product implements the docking tool window and tabbed MDI interface, and our Ribbon product is used as the primary toolbar interface.  SyntaxEditor is used to provide a Visual Studio-like code editing experience.  Patterson even wrote custom syntax languages that have fully-automated IntelliPrompt, code outlining, and more.

And the theme is spectacular.  They took our new Metro theme (recently shipped in the 2012.2 version of our WPF Controls), tinted it a bit, and voila… the result is a modern-looking app that blends perfectly with Windows 8, and other tools like VS 2012 and Office 2013.

About Test Design Studio

From Boyd Patterson, owner of Patterson Consulting:

Test Design Studio is an IDE for QuickTest® Professional scripts, VBScript files, Quality Center workflow scripts, WinRunner® scripts, and GUI Map files.

Our product focusing on bringing a rich development environment to our customers.  The challenges of achieving this product are great enough on their own, that we do not need to be burdened with core UI development.  Fortunately, Actipro Software provides many of the controls we need, so we can focus on building our product and not designing UI controls.

We have been working on a complete rewrite of the UI to use WPF technology, and Actipro Software controls have helped ease that burden.  Their Ribbon control provides a great replication of the infamous controls, and SyntaxEditor provides the editing horsepower we need to match the experience our customers demand.  Thanks to their application wide theme support, even the use of native controls look consistent with the rest of the UI.  Our new application is not yet complete, but we already have a great foundation and are excited to release this to our customers.

Details about the product (including the current WinForms version also powered by Actipro controls) are available at:  http://www.patterson-consulting.net/tds

Showcase Your Own Apps

Do you have an application powered by Actipro UI controls that you'd like to showcase on our blog?  Please contact us with a couple screens and a brief description so that we can discuss it.  We always love to see our customers' creations!