We’ve been hard at work with several new features for v24.1 of our WPF and WinForms products and are asking for beta testers to work with preview builds of what is coming to help ensure a smooth transition.

Beta testers will get an early look at the new features and can give us valuable feedback to influence any necessary development and/or bug fixes prior to the final release.  See the notes at the end of this post for details on signing up as a beta tester.

SyntaxEditor Native Dark Theme

SyntaxEditor now has built-in support for switching between light and dark themes. Previously, only UI element brushes were updated for dark themes, but the highlighting styles and icon sets had to be manually transitioned.

Now, a new SyntaxEditorThemeManager class and individual light/dark color palettes for a highlighting style registry allow for any change in the global theme to be automatically reflected in SyntaxEditor.

All Actipro-provided languages have been updated, as appropriate, with both light and dark highlighting styles, and we automatically convert many popular light-themed colors to appropriate dark-themed colors for custom languages that have yet to be updated with explicit dark styles.

SyntaxEditor Highlighting Style Updates

A new feature enables the current line number to be highlighted in a different style than the other line numbers, so the default line number colors have been updated to coordinate with this new feature.

When editing with multiple carets, distinct colors can now be defined for the primary and secondary carets.

Several other highlighting styles have also had their default values tweaked.

Theme Updates (WinForms Only)

A new Visual Studio Blue theme is available that mimics the Visual Studio 2022 Blue theme.

The renderers for Metro Light and Dark have been updated with a more modern gripper for the status bar and more subtle checked icons for checkable menu items that do not provide their own icon. Several classic renderers have also been renamed for clarity.

Beta Testers

We are looking for beta testers who:

• Will actively use supplied preview builds to help ensure the beta is stable.
• Will report suggestions for improvement of new features.
• Will report confusion or missing information from conversion notes.
• Will report any bugs that are encountered.
• Ideally are signed up in our Slack workspace, as it’s easiest to communicate through that during testing phases.

Please contact our support team privately via a ticket to sign up for beta testing:

Contact Our Support Team to Sign Up

Please indicate the following in your message:

• Your name and e-mail address.
• If you are already an existing customer, and if so, your license key.
• The platform(s) you’d like to test.
• If you are already signed up in our Slack workspace.

Thanks for your help and we look forward to working with our testers.

New maintenance releases are now available for our WPF and WinForms Controls.  Numerous new minor features and updates are included, and known issues with the recently-released .NET 8 have been resolved.

See the related WPF v23.1.4 announcement post and WinForms v23.1.3 announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

Download Buy Now

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.

Download Buy Now

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.

Download Buy Now

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.

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

Download Buy Now

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.

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.