We're currently hard at work on finishing up the 2013.1 versions of our products.  We should have more details soon on what's new.

One change we're making to our Silverlight controls is that they will be moving to the Silverlight 5 framework instead of Silverlight 4, as in previous versions.  Silverlight 5 was released well over a year ago and is plenty stable at this point.

Text Rendering Improvements in SyntaxEditor

A main reason for this change is so that we can support TextFormattingMode options in SyntaxEditor.  In the past, if you changed your Silverlight 5 app's root visual to use TextOptions.TextFormattingMode="Display" then hit testing and some rendering in SyntaxEditor would be incorrect unless you set it back to "Ideal" on the SyntaxEditor instance.

Along with the general switch for our control projects to be compiled targeting Silverlight 5, we went through all the text rendering code in SyntaxEditor and updated it to adhere to the current TextFormattingMode setting.

In this new version, regardless of which setting your app uses, it will render properly.  Let's see a comparison:

This screen shows a SyntaxEditor with a completion list and description tip display.  The left side uses the default "Ideal" mode and the right side uses the new "Display" mode option.  You can see the text clarity is a bit better with the new "Display" mode.

Summary

These enhancements will be in the 2013.1 version of the Silverlight controls, due in the next several weeks.

Today I'd like to show off another new feature coming to the WPF and Silverlight .NET Languages Add-on:  Visual Basic text formatting!

As mentioned in our previous post, a similar feature is being added for the C# language.  Text formatters beautify code, making it more readable by adjusting whitespace.

Visual Basic Text Formatting Example

Let's see an example of some messy VB code loaded up in SyntaxEditor:

After formatting the document, the result is:

That's much nicer!

Intelligent Modifications

As described in a previous post, the best part about the text formatting feature is that SyntaxEditor only adjusts ranges it needs to.  It doesn't do a mass replace of the whole document.  For instance on line 23, it tweaks the leading whitespace on the line and removes the space before the end parenthesis, but doesn't touch the rest of the line.

All of the various text change operations involved in the formatting are merged into a single atomic text change that is added as a single undo stack item.  This makes it easy for the end user to quickly undo any formatting changes that were made.

Summary

These features will be in the 2013.1 versions of the WPF and Silverlight SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on.

Today I'd like to show off a new feature coming to the WPF and Silverlight .NET Languages Add-on:  C# text formatting!

Text formatters beautify code, making it more readable by adjusting whitespace.

C# Text Formatting Example

Let's see an example.  Here is some messy C# code loaded up in SyntaxEditor:

When we format the document, the result is:

That's a lot more readable!  The text formatter also has an option for whether open curly braces appear on the same or next line.

Intelligent Modifications

The best part about this feature is that SyntaxEditor only adjusts ranges it needs to.  It doesn't do a mass replace of the whole document.  For instance on line 7, it does a tweak of the leading whitespace on the line but doesn't touch the rest of the line.

All of the various text change operations involved in the formatting are merged into a single atomic text change that is added as a single undo stack item.  This makes it easy for the end user to quickly undo any formatting changes that were made.

Summary

These features will be in the 2013.1 versions of the WPF and Silverlight SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on.

We just published new maintenance release of both the WPF and Silverlight controls.  These new builds fix a SyntaxEditor problem that we introduced in the previous maintenance release, and also have several other minor SyntaxEditor tweaks and fixes in them.

Update details are described here:

• WPF Controls
• Silverlight Controls

We recommend that you get these latest v2012.2 maintenance releases.

We're working on new features for our 2013.1 control releases and today I'd like to show off a new feature coming to the WPF and Silverlight .NET Languages Add-on in that version.

C# Var Quick Info

As seen in the screenshot below, hovering over var keywords will now show the resolved type.

In this case, the resolved type for the randomNumbers variable is List<int>, which we aliased to Int32List above in the usings.

Visual Basic Dim Quick Info

Similar features have been added for the Dim keyword in VB.

In this screenshot, the j variable is being assigned an Int32.

Summary

These features will be in the 2013.1 versions of the WPF and Silverlight SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on.