The past couple days, we've been working on enhancing our popular Metro Themes, mostly focusing on refinements and improvements to their use in our Docking/MDI product.

Our Metro Light, White, and Dark themes have been available since v2012.2 and not only theme the Actipro controls you use in your projects, but also can theme all the native WPF controls.  This allows your entire app to mesh together cleanly with a polished, professional appearance.

Theme Updates

Let's dive in and take a look at some of the updates that are coming.  First, here's a screenshot of our main Docking/MDI demo with the updated Metro Light theme:

Improvements include:

• Lighter dock site background that blends better with the window background.
• Subtle outline borders around the tabbed MDI and tool window containers.
• Tool window container title bars are no longer as in-your-face when not focused.
• Tool window container title bars now have a dotted region that help relay that they are grippable.
• New auto-hidden tool window tab appearance that is more like Visual Studio 2013.
• Tool window tab images hidden by default in Metro themes (but can be toggled back via a new option).
• Slightly lighter control backgrounds in Metro Dark theme.

Here's the same window in our Metro Dark theme:

Summary

Our feature rich Docking/MDI product, combined with our enhanced Metro themes, really provide sleek and clean docking window functionality for your WPF apps.  You won't beat the attention to detail that our themes provide.

These new features will be available in the 2014.1 version of Docking/MDI.

One feature that has been requested by a number of customers for our Docking/MDI product is to be notified of when a tool window that is auto-hidden flies out or back in, such as the Error List tool window in the screenshot below:

We just completed adding two new events to DockSite named WindowAutoHidePopupOpened and WindowAutoHidePopupClosed.  Each even passes an event args that specifies which tool window is being opened or closed.

These new features will be available in the 2014.1 version of Docking/MDI.

Earlier last year we added delimiter auto-complete features to SyntaxEditor.  Delimiter auto-complete is where the user types a start delimiter and a related end delimiter is auto-inserted after the caret.  This is especially helpful when working on mobile tablets like a Surface since it means less overall typing is required to output the same code.  Best of all, with SyntaxEditor, these features can be easily added to any custom language.

Today I'd like to announce that we have rewritten and made improvements to the internal logic used to track delimiter auto-completions.  This means that as an end user encounters an already-completed delimiter, SyntaxEditor is more intelligent about how to handle various text change operations.

Example 1

Lets check out some of the enhancements.  We'll type in some JavaScript:

In the screenshot above, the ) character was auto-completed when the ( character was typed.  Now let's type in some parameters:

Next we will type the ) character even though it already exists in the document.  SyntaxEditor intelligently knows that the ) was previously auto-completed so it moves the caret past it without entering a second ):

This sort of functionality works in the current SyntaxEditor version however only if there was nothing typed between the delimiters.  In the above scenario with the current version, since we typed in some parameter names, a second ) would have been typed.  With the most recently logic updates, SyntaxEditor now handles real-world scenarios much better.

Example 2

Let's start over to show another nice feature.  Here we've again typed a function and some parameters.  Note that the end ) was auto-completed while typing out the text so it appears after the caret.

If we Backspace over the text and get to the start ( character, upon Backspacing over that, the related end-delimiter is automatically removed too:

This feature works in the current version as well but again, only if there was nothing typed between the delimiters.  With the code updates, SyntaxEditor handles many more scenarios of typing within delimiters, and even multiple nestings of delimiters!

Summary

These new features will be available in the 2014.1 version of SyntaxEditor, in the WPF, WinRT/XAML, and Silverlight platforms, and will also appear in the next version of our free Code Writer Windows 8 app.

WPF Controls 2013.2 build 592 has been released and is now available for download.  This build focuses on numerous enhancements and bug fixes.  While many updates were made, major ones are listed below.

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

• Added the ability to alter the label positioning mode algorithm for a series.

• Improved support for high DPI scenarios.
• Improved support for highlighting tabs when interop controls get focus.

• Added support for the Metro Dark theme.

• Added a new Property Dialog QuickStart that shows how to display a dialog from a property editor.

• Added the ability to edit multiple lines of text at the same time when block selection is active.
• Added incremental search features.
• Added the ability to highlight search match results within a view.
• Added support for alpha-blended foreground/background style colors.
• .NET Languages Add-on - Added a 'deprecated' quick info note on types/members flagged as Obsolete.

• Improved WindowChrome (and RibbonWindow) rendering in various scenarios.

Back in August, we posted a blog entry showing off a sample we created, where a hosted Windows Workflow Designer instance is integrated with our WPF Docking/MDI and SyntaxEditor controls to dramatically improve the designer UI.  We then posted a second update describing several more enhancements that were made.

Today we posted a third update to the sample, which adds these new features…

• Updated to properly commit changes on editor focus loss.
• Updated the language to be a single instance instead of getting created for each editor instance, which improves performance.
• Updated to focus editor properly on the first mouse click.
• Added proper notifications of the expression editor's events.

These and our prior updates dramatically improve the end user experience when working in a rehosted Windows Workflow Designer scenario.

Summary

If you rehost the Windows Workflow Designer in your WPF apps and would like our example, please contact us and we'll be happy to share it with you!

For those customers who downloaded either of the prior versions, this update is at the same URL as before.