Actipro WPF Essentials

What's New in Actipro WPF Essentials 2011.2?

• App-Wide Themes - Actipro Themes includes professionally-designed themes that cover all system and Office themes including high contrast mode.  The themes apply to all Actipro controls and optionally to native WPF controls.
• Styles/Templates for Native WPF Controls - Enhanced styles and templates for all native WPF controls (TextBox, ToolBox, TreeView, etc.) are included.  These styles can be automatically applied app-wide via a single line of code.  Or you can choose to use them on specific controls only, accessible via pre-defined style keys.
• Common Asset Pool - There are well over 800 asset resources for each of the system and Office themes supported. All custom and native control styles/templates use the same assets. This ensures that controls placed next to each other always render with similar colors that complement each other.
• Advanced Tinting - Actipro Themes supports the tinting of any theme or portion of a theme towards a certain color. This means that you can take a built-in theme like the Office Silver theme, and make it a red one instead.
• Appearance Improvements - Actipro Themes includes updated menu, toolbar, and statusbar appearances that were inspired by Visual Studio 2010’s look. The simplified design uses a darker workspace area, with lighter content areas in each docking window.  This higher contrast appearance focuses the end user's eye on the content without distracting it with non-active UI elements, thus making for a more effective user interface.

What's New in Actipro WPF Essentials 2011.1?

• Editors - Calculator Control - The new Calculator control can be used by end-users to interactively calculate numeric values. It supports all the standard calculator functions, including: memory saving/recalling, square root, and inverse. Three different display modes are available to show more or less functionality.
• Editors - Rating Control - The new Rating control inherits from ItemsControl and renders glyphs that can be used present an average rating or collect a user rating. By default, attractive star glyphs are used, but these can be easily replaced with any custom glyph. There is also support for both horizontal and vertical orientations.
• Docking & MDI - Complete MVVM Support - New updates effectively let DockSite behave like an ItemsControl. It can now bind to a collection of view models. Each view model auto generates a docking window as a container (overridable in the same way you can with ItemsControl) that will wrap the view model and display content for it. An implicitly defined DataTemplate resource for the view model can be used to render the view model's content within the docking window. An ItemContainerStyle can be set on the DockSite to bind docking window properties like Title, etc. to appropriate properties on the view model. New MVVM demos and QuickStarts are included in the Sample Browser, along with some reusable common code (which you are free to use).
• Docking & MDI - Prism 2.2 and 4.0 Integration - For Prism support, Actipro have added the Docking/Prism Interop assembly, which includes a region adapter for the DockSite control. Once the region adapter has been registered, the DockSite can be registered/named as a region, and you can add one or more views to it. By default, the views will become documents (i.e. DocumentWindows) in the DockSite. This can be altered by adding some metadata to tell the adapter whether you want the specified view to become a document or tool.
• Docking & MDI - Miscellaneous Updates - Docking windows and containers now support the starting of drag operations programmatically. Also merged all document and tool window styles into a single style for easier definition and support of implicit styles going forward.

What's New in Actipro WPF Essentials 2010.2?

• Docking/MDI adds complete layout serialization (MDI area too), new layout deserialization options, and many new UI options.
• Ribbon adds Office 2010 themes with glass extensions into the tab area.

Actipro WPF Essentials suite includes 6 Actipro WPF control offerings, and at a significant savings.

Actipro WPF Essentials suite includes

• Docking & MDI for WPF - A complete docking tool window and multiple document interface solution.
• Editors for WPF - Part-based & masked edit controls, with advanced date/time picker.
• Navigation for WPF - Navigation bar, explorer bar, and breadcrumb controls.
• Ribbon for WPF - Easily add an Office 2007-like user interface that meets all Microsoft specifications.
• Wizard for WPF - Everything you need to quickly create wizard dialogs in your WPF applications.
• Shared Library for WPF - A set of common controls and useful components for WPF applications.

Actipro WPF Studio customers get all new Actipro WPF control products for free while their subscription is active, whereas WPF Essentials customers will not get any new WPF control products. All components included in the suite have extensive Visual Studio 2008 Designer functionality.

Please, find below a brief description of the products currently included:

Actipro Docking & MDI for WPF

Actipro Docking & MDI is a complete solution for easily adding a docking tool window and/or multiple document interface to your WPF applications. Allow your end users to drag and dock tool windows wherever they please, and to persist their customizations. Docking & MDI has been implemented with flexibility in mind. It has more options than nearly any other competitive product out there and mimics Visual Studio 2008's capabilities. While it supports all the types of standard layouts you find in most docking window products.

Actipro Wizard for WPF

Actipro Wizard for WPF is the premiere control for building wizard dialogs in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) that conform to the Wizard97 specification.

Actipro Wizard for WPF has been designed from the ground up to follow WPF best practices, be extremely configurable, and dramatically cut down on the time needed to implement a robust wizard dialog. From simple linear sequences of pages to more advanced decision-based page execution paths, Wizard can handle it all. It provides an amazing number of features that make the design and run-time experience for the developer and end user a positive one.

Major features of Actipro Wizard for WPF include:

• Multiple built-in page types like exterior and interior pages
• Page captions and descriptions that display in the header area of the page
• Page titles that can be used to automatically update the title bar of the containing Window
• Global default settings for all button visibility and enabled states that can be overridden by page-specific settings
• Uses WPF command model for handling all button clicks
• Multiple options for setting the default and cancel buttons on the containing Window to wizard buttons
• Distinct forward and backward progress animated page transition effects
• Ability to create custom styles and templates for any part of the Wizard, enabling theming and custom layouts
• Add custom controls anywhere in the wizard via templates.
• Default page sequencing that can be overridden declaratively or programmatically
• Disable pages to have Wizard skip over them when using default page sequencing
• Process selection changing/changed events at the general Wizard or WizardPage-specific levels
• Selection change events specify what caused the change, which pages are changing, and allow you to cancel the change or choose a new destination page
• Validate data on a page in the selection changing event
• Easily navigate through pages using the mouse and/or keyboard forward/back buttons
• Easily create wizard user interfaces in XAML markup
• All parts of the wizard use automatic layout so that they are capable of growing as needed
• Supports localization and right-to-left layout
• Follows the WPF accessibility model for UI automation
• XBAP compatibility
• Includes detailed documentation and a sample project that demos nearly every feature

Actipro Navigation for WPF

Actipro Navigation is a control suite that includes NavigationBar and ExplorerBar controls, along with styles for animated Expander controls, designed for use in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications.

NavigationBar is a control that fully implements all features found in Outlook 2007, such as complete end user customization, layout save/load, minimization to both left and right sides, and much more.

Explorer bar is an implementation of the task bar that was introduced in Windows XP's explorer. Each expander pane uses smooth animation to fade in and slide down its contents when expanded.

NavigationBar Features

• Duplicates Office 2007 navigation bar functionality
• 8 distinct built-in themes
• Pane buttons collapse to conserve space as needed
• Minimize to the left and right sides
• Built-in Options window
• Reusable animated expander style for sub-header panels
• Layout serialization

ExplorerBar Features

• Duplicates Windows XP explorer bar functionality
• 4 distinct built-in themes, each with alternate expander styles
• Expanders use animation to fade and slide when expanding/collapsing
• Optionally allow only one expander to be expanded at a time
• Vertical scrollbar auto-added as needed

Actipro Navigation Common Features

• Tint themes or completely restyle/template the controls
• Localization and right-to-left layout capabilities
• VS 2008 and Blend designer support
• XBAP support and much more

Actipro Editors for WPF

Actipro Editors is a control suite that implements several data entry controls for the Windows Presentation Foundation framework, including a masked textbox and parts-based editors. Each control has numerous options available and allows for a more intuitive/natural data entry. The masked textbox can be used to restrict user input to a preconfigured regular expression mask, with support for alternations and quantifiers. Parts-based editors allow the various "parts" of an associated type to be modified individually, such as entering only the month part of a date. Several parts-based editors are provided for existing .Net types, including brushes, colors, and dates/times.

Actipro WPF Shared Library

The Actipro WPF Shared Library is a common control library referenced by all of the WPF .NET controls. It contains a number of very useful controls and components that can be used in your projects.