Converting SE 4 to SE for WPF

Hi Rick,

I thought I'd jump in here before Actipro gets to your post to let you know that SE WPF does not have feature parity with SE 4 yet. I don't think the build with adornment support has been released yet (should be soon), but that build will at least give you the ability to support current line highlighting and column guides. Custom adornments is going to be a great feature. I do not believe current line highlighting or column guides will be baked in yet, but the groundwork is there.

I've been following the SE WPF development since the very beginning, and it's truly a great product. All the changes that have been made to the core framework (its completely rewritten) are going to make the WPF version so much better than SE 4. The downside, unfortunately, is that coding all these new features from scratch takes time, so you do not have a drop-in replacement for all the old SE 4 features yet. Depending on what you're trying to do, though, you might still be able to implement the WPF version.

There is no conversion guide that I know of, and I imagine that is something that Actipro will work on when SE WPF comes out of beta. Until then, the code base is potentially in flux and the conversion guide could become inaccurate.

I would suggest you come up with a bullet list of features you have to have to replace your SE 4 implementation with SE WPF. Then it should be fairly easy to determine which of those features are implemented, which would require some custom work on your own, and which might be unavailable at this time.

Hi Rick,

Although a bulk of the concepts are similar between WPF and WinForms versions, the newer framework we use in the WPF version has a much better design, and streamlines a lot of things. We don't yet have a conversion guide, but do plan on making one once its feature area coverage is the same or more as in WinForms. Right now, while many of the WPF version's features are much better than their WinForms equivalent, there still are certain feature areas we haven't gotten to implement yet. But we are working towards getting those done as soon as possible.

We include 40-50 samples already in the WPF that focus on various features, so those and the documentation help you learn it. If you have any conversion questions beyond those resources, feel free to post or write us and we'll be happy to give you some pointers.

The upcoming 2009.2 release has new tagging/adornment features described here:
http://blog.actiprosoftware.com/post.aspx?id=891d96ae-2bff-4d61-838b-23630205a5b4

They allow you to custom render anything at any z-order in the editor. We have a current line highlighting mechanism that we did some testing with but in the interests of getting 2009.2 out, it may not make the cut for the first 2009.2 release. It is built with our new public adornments framework so even if we don't add it immediately, it is possible for you to add it with 2009.2.

The same thing goes for the column guides. We don't have anything in there right now for that, but you can easily add those with the adornments feature. We'd love to hear your thoughts on column guides though, so that we could add them built-in in the future. They probably should be language-specific, and do you have any special feature requests for them?

Thanks for the information. I had forgotten that this was still in Beta, it's that good! I would like to see native support for the two features I posted about and I do like the idea of making the column guides language specific rather than specific to the SE instance. Other than that, I have no special needs reaguarding the column guides. But if you are looking for other feature suggestions, I would like to see some sort of framework to support refactoring. Not sure if you've thought about that or received this suggestion from anyone else.

BTW, I really love where you are going with the language designer and am looking forward to the final release version with great anticipation.

Rick

Hi Rick,

Even though we have the beta tag on it, it's plenty stable for production use and is used by a lot of our customers. It already has a lot more features than any of the competition and is the best performer too. We just are keeping the beta tag on it until we get closer to having most of the feature areas covered that are in the WinForms version. But again, it is plenty stable and really can be considered a released product.

For refactoring, that would probably be something specific to the .NET Languages Add-on once we get there, right? Or do you have other ideas that are more generic?

I was thinking more generic, e.g. defined at the language level by the developer, but not linked to any specific add-on. Basically, a framework/feature where you can define the rules for refactoring and then execute against those rules using services provided by the feature. I would consier this analogous to code highlighting where we define the rules, but the control does the work.

Hi Rick,

If you ever have some specific ideas on object model design, etc. for this then feel free to email us. Thanks!