WPF/WinForms Beta Testers Wanted for v24.1

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Thursday, February 8, 2024 at 4:30pm

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.

WPF and WinForms Controls Maintenance Releases

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro) - 1 comment
Tuesday, December 5, 2023 at 8:56pm

WPF Controls v23.1.3 Maintenance Release

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Tuesday, September 12, 2023 at 11:53am

This version makes a number of minor updates across the WPF control product line.  A new Custom Edit Box QuickStart sample has been added that demonstrates how to build an edit box for a custom type.

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

Download Buy Now

WPF Controls v23.1.1 Maintenance Release

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro)
Monday, June 12, 2023 at 9:00pm

This version makes a number of minor updates across the WPF control product line.  A new TreeListView sample shows how to sort columns when their header is clicked, various UI automation improvements were made, and numerous Bars enhancements were implemented.

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

Download Buy Now

WPF Controls v23.1 Released

by Avatar Bill Henning (Actipro) - 1 comment
Tuesday, April 25, 2023 at 4:21pm

While this major new version focuses on the introduction of the new Bars product beta, it also has a number of other minor updates across other products that are described in the related announcement post, which contains a detailed list of enhancements and updates.

Download Buy Now

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

Bars (Beta)

v23.1 takes the wraps off a new Bars product that implements advanced fluent ribbons, toolbars, menus, and related controls.

Ribbon in Classic layout mode with a color gallery displayed

The new fluent Ribbon has the latest Office appearance and includes the use of subtle animations throughout all controls.

Ribbon's backstage showing an included recent document list control

Ribbon can instantly switch between Classic (taller) and Simplified (single-row) layout modes, allowing for configuration of the variant resizing behavior in both modes.

Ribbon in Simplified layout mode with an Insert Table gallery displayed

Complex galleries can appear in the Ribbon, as well as in any popup and context menu. It's simple to create new galleries with rich visualizations for any need.

A standalone toolbar can display many of the same controls that Ribbon can, including popups with galleries

The StandaloneToolBar control can alternatively be used as an app's primary toolbar, or alternatively within tool windows. It can host any control that can be used in Ribbon and overflows items to a popup as needed.

Three user interface density options can be chosen, letting your application select whether to better support a large number of controls, or focus more on touch-friendliness.

The entire control hierarchy can be built using MVVM (preferred), or alternatively directly in XAML.  An optional open source MVVM library is available that makes it easy to configure the Bars controls with MVVM techniques.  In fact, the main Ribbon demo seen in earlier screenshots above is completely constructed from code-behind view models!

.NET Target and Code Signing Updates

Since .NET 5 is now out of support by Microsoft, we updated our .NET 5 targets to .NET 6. .NET 5-based apps can still use .NET Core 3.1 targets.

We’ve also moved our .NET Framework target to use 4.6.2 minimum, as it’s the most recent supported version of .NET Framework.

Finally, we now automatically code sign all our assemblies instead of shipping both non-signed and signed variations.