Questions on migrating from WinForms to WPF Editor

Is there any more guidance on the topic of migrating from the Winforms Syntax Editor to the WPF one?    In order to get the bi-directional support, I'm doing that with an old Winforms codebase, by hosting the WPF control in Winforms.

There seem to be many areas that have changed and I'm wondering if there are any articles/blogs that can help to speed up the discovery process.   For example, it looks like the event handling scheme is different (old code handles mouse hover events, but WPF doesn't have them, so it is probably some different mechanism, old lexicon files had trigger states, but new langdef files don't, no trigger activated events, spans are apparently replaced by offsets and ranges, span indicators replaced by adornments, etc.).

Hi Matt,

While we don't have specific guidance for converting from the older WinForms model to the WPF one, the WPF one does have pretty extensive documentation and about 100 samples, many of which focus on individual feature areas.

We are also happy to give you pointers for which feature areas to examine that cover similar feature areas in WinForms.

For events, yes things are very different in WPF.  In WPF, languages are service providers.  That means that to add certain features to a language, you register a service on the language.  Some service types (like ILexer and IParser) are well defined and you register services that implement those interfaces to add lexer and parser functionality.  Then there are event sink services where you can handle things like mouse events, typing input events, etc.  Check the documentation for more information on the various language services that are available.

Span indicators are still around but they are implemented by harnessing the tagging features of the WPF SyntaxEditor.  There are special recognized tags for indicators that can be applied over a text range.  Check out the documentation and the several QuickStarts on indicators, as those will show you how to work with them.

Okay, thanks.    By the way, the CHM file is a bit clunky for navigating.    Do you have the docs in any other formats (like html)?

Okay.   The thing that was annoying me about the CHMs is that whenever you follow a link (or do a search, etc.) and come back, it always goes back to the top of the page.    So, the trick is to just open the CHM in two or three separate windows, stay on track in the first one and use the others for searching and following links.    The other annoyance of CHMs is zooming the text size, but it is also managable (make the window small, zoom, then stretch it).

One other question; I'm just looking at your DataGridView control now as well, because our app shows our syntax language in a .NET DataGridView and right now we duplicate the syntax highlighting in the non-editable cells, while using the Actitpro Syntax Editor in the editable cell, which is clunky.    Does your DataGridView have smoother support for the Syntax Editor to support this kind of thing?

Hi Matt,

The DataGrid features we show are actually not a custom DataGrid control, but are free open source extensions to the native WPF DataGrid.  There isn't anything in the extensions specific to SyntaxEditor.  You could always use SyntaxEditor in a read-only mode to show the non-editable cells.