The 2014.1 versions of our WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT/XAML controls have been released and are now available for download.

Major new features are described below.  See the announcement posts for the detailed list of enhancements and updates, including many items not listed below:

• WPF Controls announcement
• Silverlight Controls announcement
• WinRT/XAML Controls announcement

Metro themes have been dramatically refined and updated in this version, mostly in the area of Docking/MDI.  Updated UI includes subtle border lines, new auto-hide tab appearance, title bar gripper decorations, and more.

Metro themes will now not show images on tabs by default, and have changed auto-hide tabs to require a click (instead of hover) to open.  These updates match Visual Studio 2013 behavior.

We've added new events for the auto-hide popup (flyout) that fire when it is opened or closed.  The popup is also now displayed using a faster default animation speed.

When the DockSite.AutoHidePopupOpensOnMouseHover property is false, clicks on auto-hide tabs are required to toggle the auto-hide popup opened and closed.

New built-in property editors for FontFamily, FontStretch, FontStyle, and FontWeight type properties have been added.

New key tip specific theme resources have been added and key tips in Metro themes now render more like Office 2013.

CheckBox-based menu items now are capable of supporting tri-state display.

Delimiter auto-completion logic for insertion and subsequent scope tracking has been greatly improved.  Delimiter indent provider can now optionally support square braces.

Added a new property that allows SyntaxEditor to measure itself based on text contents.  This works great for smaller documents in both multi-line and single-line modes.

Updated single-line mode to support word wrap, which is very useful when combined with the new view line measuring option.

Bookmark indicators now support an IsEnabled state.

LipsumGenerator class added to support generation of "lorem ipsum" placeholder text.

Changed block indent mode to retain whitespace after the caret when Enter is pressed.

.NET Languages Add-on

Numerous improvements to the VB language's handling of identifiers and variable declarations that don't include a type.

Web Languages Add-on

Added IntelliPrompt completion for keywords and symbols to the JavaScript language.

Added a new advanced JSON language that can be used to view/edit JSON files, along with a new related QuickStart.

Updated JavaScript language to support multi-line strings via backslash continuation.

Many improvements to Metro themes (mostly in the Docking/MDI area described above), and improved WindowChrome (and RibbonWindow) rendering when maximized.

WPF/Silverlight Only

Added the RadialSlider control, which is a circular slider that can be used to input any scalar value.

Added the RingSlice control, which renders a portion of a ring at designated angles and radius.

Added the CircularThumb control, which is a thumb gripper with a circular shape and arrow adornment.

Added three samples for new Shared Library controls.

WinRT/XAML Only

Added the AppBarHint control, which is a visual hint to users that app bars exist on a page, and can be tapped to toggle them open. 

Added a related QuickStart.

Sample Browser (WPF/Silverlight only)

Added the ability to toggle description sidebar on some samples.

We recently posted that the advanced JavaScript syntax language implementation in our SyntaxEditor Web Languages Add-on (WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT/XAML versions) is getting IntelliPrompt completion lists in the upcoming 2014.1 version.

In today's post, I'd like to announce that a brand new JSON syntax language is coming to the add-on as well!

Features

JSON is a lightweight data-interchange format that is a subset of JavaScript syntax, and is commonly used with many web technologies.  With the new syntax language, you'll be able to provide a great editor/viewer for JSON data.  Here's a screenshot:

The JSON syntax language has these features:

• Syntax highlighting
• Abstract syntax tree (AST) generation
• Automatic code outlining based on AST structure
• Reporting and automatic squiggle display of errors for invalid syntax
• Mouse hover quick info for syntax errors
• Smart indent
• Code block selection
• Delimiter (bracket) highlighting and auto-completion

Summary

This new syntax language will be available when the 2014.1 WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT/XAML versions are released in the next couple weeks.

Last year we added an advanced JavaScript language implementation to the SyntaxEditor Web Languages Add-on.  This language implementation (available in the WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT/XAML versions of the add-on) includes features like syntax highlighting, parsing with AST generation, syntax error reporting, code outlining, etc.

In today's post I'd like to announce that we have added a simplistic completion provider to the language that should help end user coding productivity.

Completion Provider

The new completion provider displays a completion list when Ctrl+Space is pressed:

The concept is similar to completion lists found in other popular IDEs like Sublime, where the list includes JavaScript keywords and identifiers found throughout the document.  The list has been set up to accept acronym and shortcut item matchers, meaning that any loosely-matched text will select items.  The list also auto-shrinks to only show matching items.

Summary

One feature that several customers have asked for is the ability for SyntaxEditor to automatically resize itself based on its text contents.  We didn't originally have this feature since it can be time-consuming (relatively speaking) and when editing huge documents, we didn't want to add any performance hits.

That being said, in the upcoming 2014.1 version of SyntaxEditor for WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT/XAML, we have added a new SyntaxEditor.IsViewLineMeasureEnabled property that can be set to true to activate view line measure behavior.  This means that you now can use SyntaxEditor in a layout scenario where its measured size will have an effect on its arranged size.

Multi-Line Editing Example

Let's check out an example of this in action.  Here we have a SyntaxEditor that has an XML language loaded and the new view line measure features enabled.  It's resizing itself vertically according to the number of lines in it:

Now if we press Enter a couple times, it auto-sizes to a larger height:

You can see how this would be useful when SyntaxEditor is hosted in controls like a StackPanel.

Single-Line Editing Example

We've also enhanced our single-line edit mode with a neat new feature.  Now if you set word wrap mode on and also have the view line measure features enabled, the single line will grow to render on multiple lines but will still not allow Enter to be pressed or inserted via pastes, etc.

This sort of feature is useful for scenarios where you want to allow a single line snippet of text to be edited but for the entire text to be visible.  Let's have a look:

Above we have a SyntaxEditor in single-line mode, with word wrap on, and view line measure enabled.  Let's type some more text:

Even though the text is still a single line (no line feeds are allowed in single-line mode), the word wrap caused the editor to grow taller.

Summary

These great new features will be available when the 2014.1 WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT/XAML versions are released in March.

SyntaxEditor for WPF has a free add-on included with it that provides integration with ANTLR 3.4 parsers. The add-on is described in detail in this blog post from several years back.

What is ANTLR?

ANTLR, ANother Tool for Language Recognition, was created by Terence Parr and is one of the most widely-used parsing frameworks available.  ANTLR is a framework for constructing recognizers, interpreters, compilers, and translators from grammatical descriptions containing actions in a variety of target languages. ANTLR provides excellent support for tree construction, tree walking, translation, error recovery, and error reporting.

SyntaxEditor for WPF customers know that we also have our own LL(*) Parsing Framework that has a lot of benefits over ANTLR, but due to the general popularity of ANTLR, we are pleased to support it as well.

ANTLR v4

In the past few months, ANTLR v4 was released.  There is updated tooling for Visual Studio that allows ANTLR v4 parsers to generated.  The thing is that the entire infrastructure of ANTLR parsers has changed in v4, and with those breaking changes, it prevents our add-on from working.

In ANTLR v3, you could run the parser on the document text via our add-on (and in a worker thread so it doesn't block the main UI thread), and it would return the AST results of the parsing operation asynchronously when it completed.

In ANTLR v4, the parser is not the same as there is no automatic AST generation.  Parse results can be examined via the use of the visitor pattern or a parse tree walker.  If you wish to have your own AST, you have to roll your own and construct it using a visitor or walker.  This change negates a lot of the features our add-on provided since now, you basically must hand code an IParser service to install on your language.  SyntaxEditor is fully extensible for any custom parsers, so this can be added easily.  It's just that whatever code you need to do to generate an AST or other parse data by walking the parse tree must now be custom written.

What Do You Want?

We are writing this blog post to see what you, our customers, would like to see from us in terms of ANTLR support.  Do you still wish to have our add-on support ANTLR v3 as we move forward? 

The only piece that is really useful from our ANTLR add-on when used with the newer v4 design is the ICharStream implementation that allows the parser to directly read from our text storage facility.  Since it's only one class, do we just include it open source somewhere or make a separate v4 binary with it in there?

We'd love to hear your thoughts… Please comment below or email our support address!