Universal Windows Controls 2016.1 Released

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Tuesday, February 9, 2016 at 3:35pm

BlogPostBannerUniversal.2016.1.0302

We're pleased to announce that our Universal Windows controls have officially been released and are ready for use in your Windows 10 apps!  Download a free evaluation today and start building your apps with them.

Let's take a quick glimpse at some of the samples that ship with the product and show off the controls:

ChartsBaseballStatsThumbnail   EditorsColorEditBoxThumbnail

MicroChartsCallCenterThumbnail   SyntaxEditorHtmlEditorThumbnail

EditorsDateTimeEditBoxThumbnail   MicroChartsStockReportThumbnail

ViewsTaskPlanningThumbnail   ChartsFinancialDashboardThumbnail

The focus of this first release was to port our older WinRT XAML controls up to the Universal Windows platform.  Look for plenty more updates and controls added in the future.

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Easily Manage Task Queues Using the TaskBoard Control

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Thursday, April 23, 2015 at 11:55pm

BlogPostBannerViews

The 2015.1 versions of our WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT/XAML controls were released a couple weeks ago and in today's post I'd like to highlight one of the great new controls that were introduced in that version:  TaskBoard.

TaskBoard Overview

A task board consists of zero to many columns, each of which can contain zero to many cards.  Columns and cards can be dragged and reordered, using pleasing animations.  Let's see an example to give you a picture of how it all works.

In the demo below, we have a TaskBoard control that is being utilized for a task planning system, commonly used in project management to help organize the priorities of a team.  The columns represent task groupings, and the cards represent individual tasks.  Each column has a header and optional footer that surrounds the contained card items.

TaskBoard
In this sample, each column header specifies the task grouping name and the column footer contains an "Add a task" button.  The footer of the overall TaskBoard control contains an "Add a list" button, which shows at the end of the list of columns.

The entire UI of the task board can be fully customized.  The cards can show any custom content as well, or can vary content based on data template selectors.

The TaskBoard control is designed for MVVM usage and makes it easy to fully alter the appearance of the entire layout with properties for column/card spacing, padding, corner radius, etc.  Best of all, rich animations are used whenever dragging columns or cards.

TaskBoard also works great with touch input.  Use it to create task planning systems on large touchscreen displays.

Summary

The full source TaskBoard demo seen above is included in the sample projects that ship with our WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT/XAML controls, and is available for you to check out today.

Let us know what you think after you try it!

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WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT/XAML v2015.1 Released

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Friday, April 3, 2015 at 2:31am

BlogPostBanner20151

The 2015.1 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 large detailed list of enhancements and updates, including many items not listed below:

ProductHeadingWinRTBarCodes

Our Bar Codes product has been ported to the WinRT XAML platform.  This product, which already exists on WPF and Silverlight, allows your apps to render vector-based bar codes using many common 2D and linear bar code symbologies.

BarCodes

A full set of demos and QuickStarts are included to help you get going.

ProductHeadingWPFDocking

The interop assembly that makes it easy to use Docking/MDI with the Prism framework has been updated to reference the latest Prism v5.0.

DockingMetro

We've made numerous layout and performance updates to further improve the product. 

We also have been working hard on building a completely new internal engine for the Docking/MDI product, which will be available sometime later this year.  Keep an eye on our blog for posts detailing the advanced features that are coming with those updates.

ProductHeadingWinRTEditors

All of our edit box controls in the WinRT Editors now have an IsEditable property.  When set to false, the edit box behaves more like a ComboBox, while still retaining the rich popups that make the editors unique.  This is an ideal option for apps whose primary mode of interaction is expected to be touch.

ColorEditBoxNoAlpha

The CornerRadiusEditBox, PointEditBox, RectEditBox, SizeEditBox, and ThicknessEditBox controls have been updated to support text parsing one and/or two number entries where appropriate, which is useful for easy uniform value entry.

ThicknessEditBox

In the above ThicknessEditBox, a 2 is typed and then Enter is pressed.  The value is converted to a uniform thickness of 2.

A ValueChanged event has been added to all edit boxes, which fires when a value change is committed.

Finally, edit box padding has been adjusted so that more content is visible in the same amount of space.

ProductHeadingWPFGauge

A new DigitalGauge.CharacterSegmentThickness property allows for segment thickness adjustments.  This gives you even finer control over the presentation of your digital characters.

DigitGaugeSegmentThickness

We've enhanced the 'Linear Gauge Rolling Scale' QuickStart with a new infinite rolling scale example for navigation headings.

HeadingGauge

ProductHeadingGenericSyntaxEditor

The EditorSearchView control now supports an optional "Find All" button.

EditorSearchView

The RTF export logic has been updated to support extended ASCII characters.

The free CSS language definition now supports the syntax highlighting of media queries.

We've dramatically improved the speed of large completion list display.

Several other performance improvements have been made, such as optimized the scenarios for which the TokenTagger raises its TagsChanged event, and refining of the automatic outlining update logic.

In the WinRT version, we added the SyntaxEditor.AreSelectionGrippersEnabled property, which determines whether the selection grippers show after touch within a view.

.NET Languages Add-on

The C# parser has been improved to recover better when encountering open block statements so that its AST node structure remains better in tact.

DotNetPropertyAccessor

The IntelliPrompt quick info for properties now includes accessors, making it possible to see whether a property is read-only.

Python Language Add-on

The Python language has received an enormous amount of updates, that in sum really improve the entire automated IntelliPrompt feature set.

PythonAddon

Check out all these enhancements:

  • Added IntelliPrompt for private members and updated the completion list to have Public and All filter tabs.
  • Added reflection data for private methods/fields of built-in primitive types.
  • Added IntelliPrompt for built-in exception types.
  • Improved IntelliPrompt for numerous built-in modules.
  • Greatly improved IntelliPrompt for package and module imports.
  • Improved IntelliPrompt for function parameters by examining available assert statement isinstance calls.
  • Added IntelliPrompt for static fields on classes.
  • Improved the resolution of base types for classes.
  • Added the optional IResolver.UnknownReturnTypeReferenceCallback callback that can be used to provide return type references for unknown types.
  • Updated the resolver to recognize where 'cls()' in a class method can create a new instance of the related class.
  • Updated the IntelliPrompt completion list to filter unmatched items.
  • Updated the IntelliPrompt docstring display to retain presentation of line feeds.

ProductHeadingGenericViews

The Views product has a new TaskBoard control added, available in all three (WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT) platforms.  TaskBoard can be used to create a board of reorderable columns and cards.  All of the drags use smooth animations to give you the feel that you are really interacting with the object.

RepairShopScheduling

The first full-source sample that comes with the control is a Repair Shop Scheduling demo, which shows how a TaskBoard can be used to interactively schedule work to resources, such as employees. TaskBoard excels at providing a visual way of representing work/tasks (displayed as cards) within a queue of some sort (displayed as a column).

PageBannerDefault

The second sample is a Task Planning demo, which shows how a TaskBoard can visually organize a project's tasks.

ProductHeadingGenericShared

We've added another new primitive SemiEllipse shape, which renders half of an ellipse.

SemiEllipseShape

The existing Triangle shape has a new IsClosed property that when set to false will create a triangle with only two of the sides rendered.

TriangleShape

Finally, in the WPF Shared Library, we added GradientBrushSlider.CanAddStops and CanRemoveStops properties that determine whether stops can be added and removed from a GradientBrushSlider.

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Silverlight Controls 2013.2 Released

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Wednesday, September 18, 2013 at 3:54pm

BlogPostBanner

Actipro Silverlight Controls 2013.2 have been released and is now available for download. 

Major new features are described below.  See the announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

ProductHeadingSilverlightCharts

PieChart

A new pie chart control has been added to complement our other bar, line, area, and scatter chart offerings.

Pie

The pie chart supports advanced features like multiple label positioning and display options, legend display, nesting of multiple series, hierarchical data, and more.

DonutChart

Donut

Donut charts have been added as well.  All the same features found in pie charts are found in donut charts, and the hole radius is fully configurable.

Axis Tick Labels for Percentage Stacked Charts

PercentageStackingChart

When using stacking bar or area charts with the percentage axis option, the percentage value labels now display on the axis.

Improved Scatter Chart Samples

ScatterChart

A new and improved scatter sample has been added.

ProductHeadingSilverlightSyntaxEditor

Web Languages Add-on - Advanced JavaScript Language Implementation

A new advanced JavaScript language implementation has been added to the Web Languages Add-on.

JavaScript

The syntax language features syntax highlighting, parsing, AST building, syntax error reporting, code outlining, delimiter auto-complete, smart indent, text formatting, and code block selection.

See a summary of the new language in this previous blog post.

Word Wrap

The Silverlight version of SyntaxEditor now supports word wrap features as of 2013.2.  These features have been a common request in the past.

WordWrap

Word wrapped text now also appears on printouts.

Delimiter Auto-Completion

Delimiter auto-complete is where the user types a start delimiter and a related end delimiter is auto-inserted after the caret.

DelimiterAutoComplete

In the screenshot above, the { character was typed and the } character was auto-inserted.  This feature has been added to several of the languages in our add-ons.

Delimiter Indent Provider

Curly brace auto-indent can now be easily added to any language, and it has been added to our C# and JavaScript languages in the add-ons.

When the caret is in the middle of a curly brace pair, pressing Enter normally will move the close curly brace to the next line with the caret right in front of it.  If you have an indent provider for your language, the close curly brace will be indented properly however it's still not an ideal situation because you generally want the caret to be on its own line before the close curly brace's line.

CurlyBraceIndent

This scenario is where curly brace auto-indent comes in!  This feature injects a new blank line in between the braces, indents one more level, and positions the caret on that line.

Indentation Guides

Indentation guides are subtle vertical lines that render at each tab stop on lines prior to the first non-whitespace character.  They help visually align the indentation of visible code blocks.

You can see the silver indentation guide lines in the tab stops within this screenshot:

IndentationGuides

Whitespace-only lines are intelligent and render indentation guides based on the tab stop level of surrounding text.

Improved Code Fragments Performance

Lexer and token scanning performance has been improved when using our code fragments feature, which allows you to set header and footer text to surround the document's text for purposes of parsing.

Improved Printing Support

A custom highlighting style registry can now be set explicitly for printouts.  This is ideal if your editor is in a dark theme since then you can use an alternate highlighting style registry designed for light backgrounds on printouts.

Rendering of printouts has also been improved when the syntax highlighting option is off.

.NET Languages Add-on - IntelliPrompt Parameter Info for Array Indexers

Automated parameter info support has been added when the end user edits array indexers.

.NET Languages Add-on - Customizing Completion Items Sample

A new sample is now included that shows how to add and remove items from the C# and VB automated IntelliPrompt completion list.  This ability lets you filter out certain completion list items or add your own custom ones before the list is displayed to the end user.

ProductHeadingSilverlightViews

InertiaScrollViewer

The InertiaScrollViewer control is a drop-in replacement for the native WPF/Silverlight ScrollViewer control but allows you to scroll content using touch, similar to what you're used to on Windows 8 and mobile devices.

It reacts to dragging, flicking, mouse wheel, and normal mouse operation via the scrollbars. You can adjust properties like EasingFunction, VelocityTimeRatio, and VelocityDistanceRatio to fully control how inertia scrolling looks and feels.

Our main Sample Browser pages have been updated with InertiaScrollViewer, allowing full touch interaction and navigation within them.

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WPF Controls 2013.2 Released

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 at 12:08pm

BlogPostBanner

Actipro WPF Controls 2013.2 have been released and is now available for download. 

Major new features are described below.  See the announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

ProductHeadingWPFCharts

PieChart

A new pie chart control has been added to complement our other bar, line, area, and scatter chart offerings.

Pie

The pie chart supports advanced features like multiple label positioning and display options, legend display, nesting of multiple series, hierarchical data, and more.

DonutChart

Donut

Donut charts have been added as well.  All the same features found in pie charts are found in donut charts, and the hole radius is fully configurable.

Axis Tick Labels for Percentage Stacked Charts

PercentageStackingChart

When using stacking bar or area charts with the percentage axis option, the percentage value labels now display on the axis.

Improved Scatter Chart Samples

ScatterChart

A new and improved scatter sample has been added.

ProductHeadingWPFRibbon

Improved Support for Touch

Ribbon buttons have been improved to support touch-based tapping.  Popups on all ribbon controls have also been updated to be positioned properly on tablet PCs that have the "right handed" option set.

ProductHeadingWPFSyntaxEditor

Web Languages Add-on - Advanced JavaScript Language Implementation

A new advanced JavaScript language implementation has been added to the Web Languages Add-on.

JavaScript

The syntax language features syntax highlighting, parsing, AST building, syntax error reporting, code outlining, delimiter auto-complete, smart indent, text formatting, and code block selection.

See a summary of the new language in this previous blog post.

Delimiter Auto-Completion

Delimiter auto-complete is where the user types a start delimiter and a related end delimiter is auto-inserted after the caret.

DelimiterAutoComplete

In the screenshot above, the { character was typed and the } character was auto-inserted.  This feature has been added to several of the languages in our add-ons.

Delimiter Indent Provider

Curly brace auto-indent can now be easily added to any language, and it has been added to our C# and JavaScript languages in the add-ons.

When the caret is in the middle of a curly brace pair, pressing Enter normally will move the close curly brace to the next line with the caret right in front of it.  If you have an indent provider for your language, the close curly brace will be indented properly however it's still not an ideal situation because you generally want the caret to be on its own line before the close curly brace's line.

CurlyBraceIndent

This scenario is where curly brace auto-indent comes in!  This feature injects a new blank line in between the braces, indents one more level, and positions the caret on that line.

Indentation Guides

Indentation guides are subtle vertical lines that render at each tab stop on lines prior to the first non-whitespace character.  They help visually align the indentation of visible code blocks.

You can see the silver indentation guide lines in the tab stops within this screenshot:

IndentationGuides

Whitespace-only lines are intelligent and render indentation guides based on the tab stop level of surrounding text.

Improved Code Fragments Performance

Lexer and token scanning performance has been improved when using our code fragments feature, which allows you to set header and footer text to surround the document's text for purposes of parsing.

Improved Printing Support

A custom highlighting style registry can now be set explicitly for printouts.  This is ideal if your editor is in a dark theme since then you can use an alternate highlighting style registry designed for light backgrounds on printouts.

Rendering of printouts has also been improved when the syntax highlighting option is off.

.NET Languages Add-on - IntelliPrompt Parameter Info for Array Indexers

Automated parameter info support has been added when the end user edits array indexers.

.NET Languages Add-on - Customizing Completion Items Sample

A new sample is now included that shows how to add and remove items from the C# and VB automated IntelliPrompt completion list.  This ability lets you filter out certain completion list items or add your own custom ones before the list is displayed to the end user.

ProductHeadingWPFThemes

Improved WindowChrome to Not Cover Auto-Hidden Windows Taskbar

In the past versions, WindowChrome (and thus RibbonWindow) would cover up an auto-hidden Windows taskbar when the window was maximized.  This issue has now been resolved, and the auto-hidden taskbar is now visible.

ProductHeadingWPFViews

InertiaScrollViewer

The InertiaScrollViewer control is a drop-in replacement for the native WPF/Silverlight ScrollViewer control but allows you to scroll content using touch, similar to what you're used to on Windows 8 and mobile devices.

It reacts to dragging, flicking, mouse wheel, and normal mouse operation via the scrollbars. You can adjust properties like EasingFunction, VelocityTimeRatio, and VelocityDistanceRatio to fully control how inertia scrolling looks and feels.

InertiaScrollViewer

In the screenshot above, you can see how our main Sample Browser pages have been updated with InertiaScrollViewer, allowing full touch interaction and navigation within them.

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