WPF and WinForms Controls Maintenance Releases

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Tuesday, December 5, 2023 at 8:56pm

WinForms Controls v23.1.2 Maintenance Release

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Tuesday, September 12, 2023 at 11:48am

This version makes a number of minor updates across the WinForms control product line.

See the related announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

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WinForms Controls v23.1.1 Maintenance Release

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Monday, April 3, 2023 at 8:35pm

This version makes a number of SyntaxEditor improvements, and also fixes a bug introduced in v23.1.0 when parsing image data on certain machines.  Several NuGet packages have been updated to better support cross-platform usage.

See the related announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

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WinForms Controls v23.1 Released

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Tuesday, February 7, 2023 at 10:01pm

This version contains updates across all our WinForms controls to support high DPI environments and add new dark color schemes.  .NET version compatibility was modernized to the latest supported .NET versions, and a large number of other various feature additions and bug fixes were made to all products.

SyntaxEditor with the Metro Dark color scheme

See the related announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

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Here's a look at some of the new features.

DPI Awareness

Historically, high DPI support in WinForms has been a mixed bag. Newer Windows API’s and recent updates to .NET have greatly improved the scenario, but high DPI support is still not free and developers must put in the effort to ensure proper DPI awareness.

How numerous Actipro WinForms Controls render in 200% DPI with the v23.1 updates

With our WinForms Controls v23.1 updates, we’ve done our part to make sure our controls can render correctly in high DPI environments. Some of the changes include:

  • Scale font sizes.
  • Scale control dimensions.
  • Scale glyphs.
  • Scale raster images using optimal technique for the scale factor (e.g., pixel doubling at 200% dpi).
  • Scale built-in dialogs.
  • New vector-based common images for SyntaxEditor IntelliPrompt.
  • New DPI-friendly dock guides for Docking.
  • New DpiHelper class to simplify scaling based on DPI.
  • Updated Sample Browser to be DPI-aware.

NOTE:  Anyone with a DPI-aware application needs to read our v23.1 conversion topic and thoroughly test. It could be that you were already compensating for lack of DPI-awareness that we now handle, so you don't want to do something like scale our controls if we're already scaling them (causing double scaling).

Dark Color Scheme

We’ve also revamped how all renderers determine which colors are being used so we can better support a dark color scheme. New “Metro Dark” renderers are available for all our products and can be used to better integrate with dark-themed applications.

.NET Compatibility Updates

In regards to .NET version compatibility, we have:

  • Validated that v23.1 works great with .NET 7.
  • Updated our .NET 5 targets to .NET 6, since that is the lowest supported version of .NET per Microsoft.
  • Updated our .NET Framework 4.0 targets to .NET Framework 4.6.2, since that is the lowest supported version of .NET Framework per Microsoft.

WinForms Controls v23.1 Release Preview

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro) - 2 comments
Friday, January 6, 2023 at 12:47pm

The WinForms Controls v23.1 release is close to ready, and includes sweeping changes across all products to support high DPI environments and new dark color schemes. We have extensively tested this release internally and have already received positive feedback from beta testers, but we know every customer’s implementation of DPI support can vary greatly and would like to get more exposure before full release.

If you would like to assist with evaluating the release (especially DPI awareness) in your own application and provide feedback on changes before release, please email our support address for access to a release candidate.

How numerous Actipro WinForms Controls render in 200% DPI with the v23.1 updates

DPI Awareness

Historically, high DPI support in WinForms has been a mixed bag. Newer Windows API’s and recent updates to .NET have greatly improved the scenario, but high DPI support is still not free and developers must put in the effort to ensure proper DPI awareness.

With our WinForms Controls v23.1 updates, we’ve done our part to make sure our controls can render correctly in high DPI environments. Some of the changes coming in the next release include:

  • Scale font sizes.
  • Scale control dimensions.
  • Scale glyphs.
  • Scale raster images using optimal technique for the scale factor (e.g., pixel doubling at 200% dpi).
  • Scale built-in dialogs.
  • New vector-based common images for SyntaxEditor IntelliPrompt.
  • New DPI-friendly dock guides for Docking.
  • New DpiHelper class to simplify scaling based on DPI.
  • Updated Sample Browser to be DPI-aware.

Dark Color Scheme

We’ve also revamped how all renderers determine which colors are being used so we can better support a dark color scheme. New “Metro Dark” renderers are available for all our products and can be used to better integrate with dark-themed applications.