We're happy to announce that the 2018.1 versions of our WPF, Universal Windows, and Silverlight controls have been released.  These versions include a new WPF Shell product, new features, and a lot of minor updates and bug fixes throughout the control sets.

See all the details on the 2018.1 releases in the various announcement posts:

• WPF Controls announcement
• Universal Windows Controls announcement
• Silverlight Controls announcement

Introducing Shell Controls (WPF only)

The 2018.1 version of the WPF Controls introduces a beta of a new Shell controls product that we've been developing the past several months.

Actipro Shell controls allow for easy folder and file browsing. While the product comes packed with a pre-built implementation for the Windows shell that mimics Windows Explorer, the controls are fully customizable, allowing you to filter or change the folders/files presented. Or build your own shell service to support other files systems, such the remote side for a FTP client.

The ShellTreeListBox control presents a shell folder hierarchy in a tree structure. It is often paired with a ShellListView control, which shows the contents of a selected folder using column-based property display. Both controls support customizable tool tips, context menus, multiple image sizes that account for high-DPI scenarios, and in-line renaming.

All of the UI found in the Shell controls is native WPF, even the context menus. Unlike competitive products with interop-based user interfaces, the Actipro Shell controls don't have any airspace or focus issues, and every bit of UI can be fully-themed or even customized with XAML data templates.

Although these controls are still in beta, they should be stable for usage in production.  If you would like to submit suggestions for improvement, please post them in our Shell discussion forum or join our Slack workspace.  We've done a lot of planning with beta testers in the Slack #uicontrols channel.

Our v2017.2 WPF, Universal Windows, and Silverlight controls have all been updated with new maintenance releases that are now ready for download. 

Let's take a quick look at some of the more notable features that were added.

Charts

Bar Customization

The series style selector's method for picking each bar's style in a bar chart has been updated to be passed bar index and count, allowing for individual bars to be customized.

Docking/MDI

UIA Updates for Better Coded UI Test Support

The docking window container UIA hierarchy has been updated to better support Coded UI Test.  These changes should now allow Coded UI Tests for controls in docking windows to record and play back successfully.

Keeping Auto-Hide Popups Open For Dialogs

There is now a property that can be set temporarily to prevent an auto-hide popup from closing when WPF keyboard focus is lost from it, which can happen if a dialog window is opened from a button on the docking window.  In this scenario in the past, the button could be clicked and the auto-hide popup might slide back.  The new option allows the popup to remain open when the dialog is open.

Improved Dragging Over Nested Linked Dock Sites

Updated docking window logic now shows dock guides by default for linked dock sites at the same nesting level, when there are multiple dock sites nested.  If there are multiple linked dock sites covering the same drag location, the Shift key can be held to switch dock guides to an alternate dock site.

Editors

MaskedTextBox Input Improvements

Logic has been updated to block some input that would trigger a shorter match.

NaN and Infinity Support Added to Multiple Edit Boxes

The CornerRadiusEditBox, PointEditBox, RectEditBox, SizeEditBox, ThicknessEditBox, and VectorEditBox controls now all have properties that can be set to allow NaN and infinity component values.

Gauge

Improved Digital Gauge Segment Rendering

The distance between digital gauge segments for the 7-segment (normal) and 14-segment (normal) character sets has been reduced, making the digital gauges easier to read at certain sizes, and more like most real readouts.

SyntaxEditor

Free Sample C#/VB Syntax Language Updates

The free language definition files now support C# 6 and VB 14 enhancements.

XML Start Tag Self-Closing

The XML auto-completion logic in the Web Languages Add-on will self-close start tags if a '/' is typed.

Summary

There were also a large number of smaller improvements made throughout the products.  See the announcement posts for the detailed list of enhancements and updates:

• WPF Controls announcement
• Universal Windows Controls announcement
• Silverlight Controls announcement

As mentioned in a previous post, we have been working on refactoring the core internal implementation of our SyntaxEditor code editor control on the WPF, UWP, and WinForms platforms.  This effort is being made to bring all three platforms onto the same codebase for easier updating moving forward, and to enhance features wherever possible.

As we continue development of SyntaxEditor vNext, we are getting into porting in the caret/selection feature area.  We've seen a couple newer editors support the concept of multiple carets/selections and would like to get some feedback on if this is a desired feature by our customers.  This is different than the rectangular box selection feature we currently already support.

Rectangular Box Selection

Rectangular box selection is already supported in SyntaxEditor and looks like this:

When this selection is active, you can type and it will enter text at the same column on each line.  You can also copy box-selected text and when it's pasted, it will retain the box layout.  This is a very handy and powerful feature.

Multiple Carets/Selections

Now what happens if you want to make multiple updates but not necessarily in the same column.  Let's take a look at a scenario:

In the screenshot above, the caret is next to a Write method call.  Let's say we want to update all the Write method calls to be WriteLine instead.  We could change it once and copy/paste it to the other locations.  But if we had multiple caret support, you could throw a caret at the end of each of the four Write method calls (in various columns) and simply type Line to update all of them.

One implementation of this I saw used Alt+Click to add carets.  I don't personally like this because Alt is used as a system menu accelerator and causes issues like underlines to appear in menus if you Alt+Click. 

Another implementation of this used Ctrl+Click to add carets.  That seems better since it won't run into the system menu accelerator issue.  The downside is that Ctrl+Click is currently used in SyntaxEditor (and Visual Studio's code editor) to do quick word selection.  Thus we'd need to rework some of our existing keyboard shortcuts to accommodate new features.

Both these implementations also use Ctrl+U as a way to undo the last selection change, whereas SyntaxEditor and VS currently tie that keyboard shortcut to making selected text lowercase.

Summary

Let's hear from you… is the multiple caret/selection feature something you'd like to see?  How would you prefer to see the keyboard shortcuts adjusted to accommodate new features?

Our v2017.2 WPF, Universal Windows, and Silverlight controls have all been updated with new maintenance releases that are now ready for download.  It is highly recommended that you get these new builds since many products received numerous minor enhancements and bug fixes. 

Let's take a quick look at some of the more notable features that were added.

Charts

Display Optimizations

The line charts have had optimizations in them to try and align to pixel values to reduce anti-aliasing.  While this generally improved readability, when rendering a curve like a sine wave, this can result in some jaggedness of the curve.  We added an option that allows these display optimizations to be turned off for those scenarios.

Docking/MDI

Dock Host Changed Event

A new event is raised whenever a docking window's dock host changes, allowing for knowing when a docking window transitions to a floating state and back.

Dragging Enhancements

The dragging experience for a single tab has been improved.  When dragging a docking window over a nested linked dock site, the Shift key can be used to target the outer dock host.

Interop Improvements

Numerous improvements were made to how InteropFocusTracking handles mouse clicks and focus tracking for interop controls in docking windows.

Dock Guides

Dock guides (when in non-hosted node) can now render outside of the bounds of the target dock host when necessary.  This scenario can occur if the containers in the dock host are small.

Editors

MaskedTextBox Data Binding

A new MatchedText property has been added to MaskedTextBox to allow data binding without any prompt text.

Pointer Double-Clicks

Double-clicking an edit box part now selects the entire part's text.

Color Picker Alpha Component

The ColorPicker's alpha component has been changed to be percentage-based, which is more in line with most applications.

Grids

Key Handling

The ability to customize how Enter keys are handled for various property editor types has been added.

SyntaxEditor

Read-Only Regions

Read-only regions have been enhanced with properties that determine if editing is allowed on their first and/or last edges.

Code Outlining

The code outlining logic has been Improved to better handle mismatched outlining nodes.

JSON Parser

The JSON parser in the Web Languages Add-on has been enhanced with better error handling.

Theme Browser

We've updated the Theme Browser utility in the Sample Browser with a new textbox that allows filtering of resources.

Summary

There were also a large number of smaller improvements made throughout the products.  See the announcement posts for the detailed list of enhancements and updates:

• WPF Controls announcement (and additional small bug fix build)
• Universal Windows Controls announcement
• Silverlight Controls announcement

As mentioned in a previous post, we have been working on refactoring the core internal implementation of our SyntaxEditor code editor control on the WPF, UWP, and WinForms platforms.  This effort is being made to bring all three platforms onto the same codebase for easier updating moving forward, and to enhance features wherever possible.

In the previous SyntaxEditor vNext post, we showed some massive improvements in SyntaxEditor touch interaction, including inertia-based touch scrolling and pinch-to-zoom features.  In today's post, we'll examine a new feature area that allows you to customize the line numbers displayed in each view's line number margin.

Default Behavior

By default, a view's line number margin displays the line number (document line index plus one) for each view line.  If a view line is a wrapped line, nothing appears for that view line in the margin.

In vNext, several new features are being added to support customization of the line number display.

Document Fragment Scenario

One scenario where line number customization is appropriate is when you have an enormous file and only want SyntaxEditor to show a fragment of it, such as several thousand lines.  In this scenario, you might make a document with lines 10,000-20,000 in it.  The first line in SyntaxEditor is really line 10,000 in the file, but it normally shows as line #1 in the line number margin.  This can be confusing to the end user.

A new property on the document class allows you to change the line number origin, which defaults to 1.  For the scenario described above, you'd set it to 10,000 instead.  All line numbers after that origin number will continue to be relative to it.

Advanced Scenarios

What about cases where a language might have specific line numbers or labels that should show for certain view lines?  This is possible too via a new language service that allows for completely customizing the text to display for each view line in the line number margin.

In the screenshot above, we've set the line number margin to show the zero-based offset of each line.  For a couple lines, we've also indicated labels for the namespace and class lines.

Summary

The new custom line numbering features are very easy to use for changing default line number margin content.