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.

A new Avalonia UI Controls release is now available the adds several great new controls.

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

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Fundamentals

Avatar

Avatar controls are used to represent people or objects. They can render a full-size image, a centered glyph, a person's initials, or text.

When text is provided, initials can automatically be derived. Large text-based content will scale down to try and fit within the circle as needed. A generic "empty" glyph will be displayed when no avatar content is provided.

An avatar is most distinctive when using image-based content, so text-based content can be harder to differentiate. While an avatar's foreground and background can be manually specified, there is built-in logic to automatically select color combinations based on the avatar's content and using either a solid or soft appearance.

Avatar derives from Button and supports the standard button command model and click events.

AvatarGroup

Use an AvatarGroup to render multiple Avatar controls. Avatars in a group can overlap with each other by a given size percentage, and you can expand the avatars on mouse hover. When the avatars don't fit in the available space, they can overflow to a popup.

Wrap the group in a chromeless button to make an actionable avatar group that executes a task when clicked.

Badge

Badges can add contextual information to target elements, or even used on their own. Badges can display small content like text, counts, icons, or can render as a dot.

When a badge adorns an element, it shows and hides using an animated "pop" effect. It can be easily aligned to any anchor position on the target element.

NumericBadge

NumericBadge inherits Badge and supports binding to a numeric value, such as a count value. The badge automatically displays when the count increments to a positive number and hides when decrementing to zero.

The displayed numeric value has overflow support, meaning that a large value can be restricted to only show "99+" for example.

RingSpinner

The RingSpinner control renders an animated ring where the two ring segment ends chase each other around the circle.

It is used when some form of processing is occurring to tell the end user that something is happening.

Shared Library

RingSlice

The RingSlice shape renders a portion (or the entire circle) of a ring shape. Its start/end angles, radius, thickness, and other stroke properties can be set.

Ring slice shapes can be combined in many interesting ways within UI, primarily used to create progress indicators.

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.

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A new Avalonia UI Controls release is now available the adds an exciting new feature named user interface density.  Best of all, this feature is part of Actipro Themes and completely free to use!

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

Themes

Spinner Horizontal Buttons

A new theme definition option has been added to support arranging the ButtonSpinner and NumericUpDown buttons horizontally instead of vertically.  A horizontal arrangement uses more space but is more touch-friendly.  Our sample project also shows how this option can be updated for certain user interface densities only, such as Spacious.

User Interface Density Updates

Our previous v23.1.1 release added a new user interface density feature that allowed controls and views to dynamically adjust spacing based on a density setting.  This feature was a real gamechanger and works very well, however it was discovered that the parsing of numeric values in our new XAML markup extensions wasn't always utilizing invariant culture.  Therefore, on some systems with non-English cultures, numbers were parsed incorrectly and spacing was far too large.  This issue has been corrected in this maintenance release.

A new Avalonia UI Controls release is now available that adds an exciting new feature named user interface density.  Best of all, this feature is part of Actipro Themes and completely free to use!

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

What is User Interface Density?

User interface density describes how tightly controls are packed together.  A simple setting on an Actipro theme definition sets the application-wide user interface density, which can adjust appearance features such as:

• Margin
• Padding
• Corner radius
• Width, height, and related minimum and maximums
• Panel spacing
• Grid length
• Other various scalar values

These appearance features can be controlled anywhere in XAML via the use of theme resources and special XAML markup extensions.

UI Density Options

User interface density is a theme definition setting you can set at app startup and even change dynamically at run-time. 

There are three UI density options:

• Spacious - Most touch-friendly, and what our first Avalonia UI Controls version used.
• Normal - A balance between touch-friendly and fitting more controls in available space.  This is the new default.
• Compact - Intended more for desktop apps that want to maximize the number of controls fit in available space.

The screenshot above shows how the exact same XAML snippet that uses our theme resources and special XAML markup extensions can auto-adjust its appearance based on the current UI density setting.

Summary

We think that offering UI density features in a theme is extremely important, and we are excited to see how customers make use of this new capability.  These features allow you to tailor your app's view's to fit your end user's needs and can be adjusted based on the amount of data your app needs to display. 

Give it a try by downloading our samples project and when running the samples app, use the View menu to adjust the user interface density.  You'll see how the entire application adjusts its appearance.

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