Actipro WPF Studio

What’s new in WPF Studio 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.
• IntelliPrompt Parameter Info - Show information about each member signature being edited. This makes it easy to implement parameter info for your own custom languages. Parameter info can handle rich-formatted content display using HTML-like markup tags. Colors and font weights or styles can be used to bring attention to portions of the info tip. The .NET Languages Add-on has been updated to fully take advantage of the new parameter info feature. Both the C# and VB language implementations now have parameter info features out-of-the-box, making for a true Visual Studio-like code editing experience. When there are multiple overloads for a signature, the resolver will do its best to show the one that best fits the code that has been typed thus far.
• Single-Line Edit Mode - Make the editor appear like a standard TextBox, where there are no scrollbars and line terminators are not accepted as input. While in single-line edit mode, nearly all the standard UI features found in SyntaxEditor are still available, such as automated IntelliPrompt, adornments, etc.
• Code Fragment Editing - Edit a portion of a document, such as a method body or just an expression. The benefit of using code fragments is that you can also set up header and footer text to get pre- and post-appended to the text being edited. Since a complete document is then used for parsing and resolution, automated IntelliPrompt, code outlining, and other features work correctly on the fragment being edited.

Actipro WPF Studio Overview

Actipro WPF Studio currently includes: Actipro Ribbon, Actipro Wizard, Actipro Navigation, SyntaxEditor for WPF, Editors for WPF, Actipro PropertyGrid, Actipro Bar Code and the Actipro Shared Library. WPF Studio licenses include one year of free upgrades to any new WPF product versions and also any new WPF component products introduced. 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 Ribbon WPF .NET

Office 2007-like ribbon UI control suite for WPF applications that adheres to Microsoft’s specifications. Actipro Ribbon WPF provides an Office 2007-like ribbon user interface that can be used in any WPF application and adheres to Microsoft's ribbon requirements. Supports ribbon resizing, application menu, QAT, many control types, contextual tab groups, key/screen tips, XBAP compatibility, VS designer support, and more. Actipro Ribbon has been designed from the ground up to follow WPF best practices, be extremely configurable, use a command-driven model, and allow for reproduction of nearly all the user interface features found in Office.

Ribbon WPF .NET Features

• Full implementation of the core Microsoft ribbon user interface requirements.
• Ribbon bar that has tabs containing groups capable of hosting child controls.
• Built-in control types include buttons, checkable buttons, popup buttons, split buttons, checkable split buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, textboxes, comboboxes, font family comboboxes, font size comboboxes, separators, labeled separators, in-ribbon galleries, popup galleries, and color picker galleries.
• Gallery controls that can be used in-ribbon or on popups and support data binding to any source, rendering via templates or custom draw, animated scrolling, multiple resizing options, selection tracking, categories, filtering, and zooming-in on item mouse over.
• Color picker gallery control supports multiple categories of colors and optionally auto-generates lighter/darker shades of colors.
• Use any built-in ribbon control standalone anywhere outside of the ribbon.
• Ability to add any control, including UserControls, anywhere into the ribbon, popups, menus, or the application menu.
• Multiple ways to lay out controls on the ribbon via the use of various panels.
• Application menu, with menu items and footer buttons.
• Ability to place any control on the right side of the application menu, such as a recent documents list.
• Quick access toolbar that can be displayed above or below the ribbon.
• Cloning framework for customizing the QAT and persisting changes between application sessions. Full source for a Customize QAT dialog page is included.
• Contextual tab groups whose visibility can be toggled on and off.
• RibbonWindow class that can be used to provide a Office-like window appearance, even without the use of a ribbon control.

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 Views for WPF

Actipro Views for WPF offers a range of panels that support fluid animations of the child elements for the Windows Presentation Framework. Actipro Views for WPF also includes several built-in animations, which can be easily customized, or you can build your own using native WPF animations. Drop-in replacements are available for several native WPF panels, including Canvas, DockPanel, StackPanel, and WrapPanel. Actipro Views for WPF includes additional panels that use unique layout logic, not found natively in WPF

Actipro Gauge for WPF

Actipro Gauge is a control suite that implements circular, linear, and digital gauge controls for the Windows Presentation Foundation framework. Each gauge control has tons of options available, providing for limitless possibilities. Gauge controls are ideal for displaying several data points in a concise and compact area. Everything from car dashboards to medical and industrial equipment use gauges, and are quickly recognized and understood by users. The circular and linear gauges are perfect for presenting a value, or values, bound by a specific range. The digital gauge is perfect for mimicking real-life LED displays.

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

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 Bar Code

An easy-to-use vector-based bar code generation suite written in WPF. Add bar codes with many display options directly in your application or in any WPF context, like XPS documents. The most common symbologies, everything from Code 39 to EAN to UPC and more, are all supported. Use bar codes in your organization to more efficiently input data or even save money on postage (via the use of Postnet). This product is useful for adding bar codes to any WPF application or report. Bar codes can be saved in XPS document content, saved to image files, rendered directly to a WPF DrawingContext, or added as a child control in any FixedDocument, FlowDocument or other WPF control.

Actipro Bar Code takes all the work out of the bar code generation process, by allowing you to simply say what value to encode. It will automatically calculate any appropriate checksums and will generate the barcode for you. The output is completely customizable with many options, everything from setting the bar height to display of the encoded value below the bar lines.

The most common symbologies are all supported, including EAN-13, EAN-8, UPC-A, UPC-E, Code 39 (and full ASCII variant), Code 93 (and full ASCII variant), Code 128, Codabar, Interleaved 2 of 5, and Postnet

Actipro SyntaxEditor for WPF

SyntaxEditor for WPF is a text editing control that is packed with features for efficient code editing, including syntax highlighting, line numbers, block selection, IntelliPrompt UI, split views, zooming, bi-di support, and much more. It has many of the same code editing features found in the Visual Studio code editor. SyntaxEditor is built on top of our next-generation extensible text/parsing framework. While over 20 sample languages are available to get you started (such as C#, VB, XML, and more), custom language definitions can be developed and distributed with your applications as well. SyntaxEditor is designed for use in IDE (integrated development environment) applications, however there are many other applications out there than can take advantage of such a control.

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.

Actipro PropertyGrid

Actipro PropertyGrid control brings the power of the native Windows Forms PropertyGrid to WPF applications with support for many ComponentModel attributes, such as BrowsableAttribute, CategoryAttribute, EditorAttribute, MergablePropertyAttribute, and many more. Actipro PropertyGrid control can be populated using static items defined in XAML with binding support, or dynamically by leveraging TypeDescriptors, including support for ICustomTypeDescriptor.

Several property editors are included, which leverage existing WPF controls. Custom property or category (as seen in Microsoft Expression Blend) editors can be used as well, to provide a custom look or feel.

General Features
Controls

• A ReflectionContentControl control, which is a content wrapper that makes it possible to create reflection effects in seconds.
• A ResizableContentControl control, which is a content wrapper that contains a gripper for resizing the content horizontally, vertically, or both.
• A RadioButtonList control, which is a ListBox whose items render as radio buttons.
• A CustomDrawElement element, which is an element that raises an event when it is being rendered, allowing for custom draw.
• A DropShadowChrome decorator, which can be used to render a drop shadow for a popup.

Calendar

• DateTimePicker and MonthCalendar controls that allow for selection and text entry of date/time values.
• Helper classes and value converters for working with date/time values.

Color Selection
Color selection controls that mimic the visual color selection found in products like Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Expression Blend:

• SpectrumColorPicker - A color hue spectrum-based color picker that can display initial and selected colors.
• SpectrumSlice - Displays a slice of saturation/brightness colors for a particular hue.
• SpectrumSlider

Document Management

• Multiple classes for maintaining document references and tracking/persisting recently-used documents.

Media

• A UIColor structure that provides an enhanced representation of a Color object that supports the RGB, HSB, and HLS color models, conversion between models, and numerous other color helper methods.
• A VisualTreeHelperExtended class that provides several helper methods for working with visual trees that are not found in the VisualTreeHelper class.

Animation

• A transition effects library for performing transitions between two elements, with built-in transitions and the ability to create custom ones.
• Built-in transitions include:
  • Barn door wipe - A wipe transition between two pages that uses two straight bars with a configurable gradient spread.
  • Bar wipe - A wipe transition between two pages that uses a straight bar with a configurable gradient spread.
  • Box wipe - A wipe transition between two pages that uses a box.
  • Fade - The old selected page fades into the new one with optional blur effect.
  • Faded zoom - A crossfade transition between two elements that zooms the new content in as well.
  • Four box wipe - A wipe transition between two pages that uses four boxes.
  • Slide - A slide transition between two pages that moves one page over the other.
  • Push - A slide transition between two pages that pushes one page out of the way for the other.
  • Wedge wipe - A wipe transition between two pages that uses a wedge shape.