With the 2013.1 versions of our WPF and Silverlight controls coming soon, I'd like to take this time to showcase the major redesign we just did to our Sample Browser applications in both platforms.

The Sample Browser is the main project that houses the hundreds of demos and QuickStarts for our many UI control products.  While the current Sample Browser design is functional, it was built several years back and needed a refresh.  We wanted to simplify things a bit and bring more of a modern UI feel to it.

Let's take a look at the result!

Product Selection

When first starting the Sample Browser, you are brought to a Product Selection page.  Scroll horizontally to see the various control product sets we offer.  Click on a product to dive into it.  Let's click the Micro Charts product.

Product Feature Summary

The Micro Charts' Feature Summary page appears.  It has a brief overview of the product and numerous screenshot links that take you directly into the samples.  By scrolling right, we can continue to learn more about the product with bullet lists of features.

Note how the Samples section tells us that there are 29 total samples available.  By clicking the Feature Summary drop-down heading at the top, a backstage-like pane appears that lists the titles of all the samples.  Click any of the sample title hyperlinks there to jump directly to the related sample.

Let's click the Call Center demo link.

Product Sample

We now have moved directly into the related sample.  In this case, it's the Call Center demo for Micro Charts.

It's easy to browse through samples.  The Previous Sample and Next Sample buttons at the top cycle through the samples for this product.  Or as mentioned before, you can click the large heading drop-down (that currently reads Call Center in this screenshot) to see a list of links for all the samples.

Clicking the Home icon on the upper left returns us to the Product Selection page.

Other Options

The three drop-down buttons on the upper right are important too and can be used from anywhere in the app.

The Theme drop-down lets you change the current theme.  Choose from our various system, Office, or Metro themes.  And the entire app window will update immediately.  Note how the root window here is using our WindowChrome class to provide custom chrome.

The Discover drop-down provides access to various Actipro-related web sites.

The Tools drop-down gives access to documentation, several utilities (like our String Resource Browser), the Release History documents, and more.

Summary

We've put a lot of extensive work into the redesign of our Sample Browser app.  We really hope you enjoy the new modern look when you get your hands on it, upon the release of the 2013.1 version.

One of the feature areas we're adding to WPF and Silverlight SyntaxEditor controls is the ability to create indicators, which are special "tagged" regions of text that optionally display a glyph in the indicator margin or highlight the text range with special styles.

Several built-in indicator types will come with SyntaxEditor, one of them being bookmarks.

Bookmark Indicators

Bookmarks are line-based indicators, meaning they associate themselves with a single line of text.  Even as the line gets edited, they remain associated with a single full line.  They move around with the same logic found in Visual Studio's code editor.

Let's see what they look like:

In this screenshot, we show three bookmarks rendered in the indicator margin on the left.  Our default implementation of bookmarks only renders glyphs in the margin, and doesn't highlight the marked line in the text area in any way (but you could optionally do this too if you wanted).

The toggle bookmark button checks to see if a bookmark is already on the caret's line.  If there is one, it removes it.  If there isn't one, it adds a new bookmark.  Clear all bookmarks removes them all from the document.

The previous and next bookmark buttons use our indicator search API to find another indicator based on an initial line.  In this case, we pass in the line that contains the caret and find the previous/next indicator.  If one is found, we move the caret to that line.

Summary

These features will be in the 2013.1 versions of the WPF and Silverlight SyntaxEditor controls.

We are still working on the design and implementation of indicators.  If you have any feature suggestions, now is the time to contact us!  Please comment here or e-mail us with your ideas and questions.

As we finally draw near the release of the 2013.1 versions of our WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT/XAML controls, I'd like to take this opportunity to announce a new product being added to all three platforms:  full size charts!

The platforms mentioned above already have our Micro Charts product, which is ideal for visualizing data in small sizes, such as in grids or dashboards.  Customers have asked for complementary large charts that have multiple-axis support, grid lines, etc.  And we have delivered.  The 2013.1 versions will be receiving full size charts, and as usual, the API will be the same among the three platforms, allowing you to easily port code around.

First Look

Let's take a first look at a Surface device running the WinRT version of a Charts demo:

In this Baseball Stats sample, we compare the statistics of two fictional baseball players and visualize important data through the use of charts.

Summary

We are currently finishing up the 2013.1 versions for the platforms and hope to have them (and the new Charts products) out in the next couple weeks or so.  Keep watching our blog for more details.

In the 2012.2 version of our WPF Controls, we added two Metro themes.  The Metro Light theme renders similar to VS 2012's gray window, and the Metro White theme renders similar to an Office 2013 window.

We've had several requests for a dark theme, and we've delivered one for the upcoming 2013.1 version of our WPF Controls!

Sample Screenshots

Here is the main SyntaxEditor demo with the Metro Dark theme active.  We updated the Sample Browser to show off use of dark SyntaxEditor highlighting styles for some common languages when the Metro Dark theme is activated. 

In this screen, we show a mail app using the dark theme.  Just like in the prior screen, it is a regular WPF Window but we've applied our WindowChrome on it to enable the full Metro appearance.

All of the Actipro and native controls support the new theme.  Here we see a Wizard with various text, links, and buttons all fully themed.

Easily Theme Your Entire App

Actipro has a very robust theming system that allows you to fully theme your entire WPF application with several lines of code.  We include over 10 built-in themes and they can optionally apply themed styles to native WPF controls as well.  Each theme involves almost 900 distinct resource assets, such as brushes and thicknesses, specifically designed for the theme.

In addition, our WindowChrome class lets you instantly transform a normal WPF Window to a chromed window that matches the theme.

The end result is that your windows, native WPF controls, and Actipro controls all blend well together and provide a consistent user interface for your customers.

Summary

This new Metro Dark theme will be included in the 2013.1 version, due in the next several weeks.

Today I'd like to show off another new feature coming to the WPF and Silverlight .NET Languages Add-on:  Visual Basic text formatting!

As mentioned in our previous post, a similar feature is being added for the C# language.  Text formatters beautify code, making it more readable by adjusting whitespace.

Visual Basic Text Formatting Example

Let's see an example of some messy VB code loaded up in SyntaxEditor:

After formatting the document, the result is:

That's much nicer!

Intelligent Modifications

As described in a previous post, the best part about the text formatting feature is that SyntaxEditor only adjusts ranges it needs to.  It doesn't do a mass replace of the whole document.  For instance on line 23, it tweaks the leading whitespace on the line and removes the space before the end parenthesis, but doesn't touch the rest of the line.

All of the various text change operations involved in the formatting are merged into a single atomic text change that is added as a single undo stack item.  This makes it easy for the end user to quickly undo any formatting changes that were made.

Summary

These features will be in the 2013.1 versions of the WPF and Silverlight SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on.