.NET 10 WinForms News

Build, Read and Manage PDFs in WinForms Apps

January 22, 2026
Make it easy to view, create, search, and print PDFs directly in WinForms applications, supporting consistent and dependable document processes.

PDF reading and writing features form a core part of modern PDF components, allowing applications to view, generate, edit, and share PDF documents consistently across platforms. These capabilities cover common tasks such as displaying and searching documents, as well as creating and exporting PDFs programmatically with reliable rendering and standards compliance.

Common features include:

  • Creating PDFs allows applications to generate new PDF documents from code, data, or templates, supporting structured content, formatting, and metadata.
  • Printing/Saving to PDF enables users or systems to output documents to PDF format for sharing or archiving, with control over layout and print settings.
  • Printing PDFs to a printer provides direct printing capabilities, allowing PDF documents to be sent to physical printers with control over output settings.
  • Localization ensures PDF content, UI elements, and formatting adapt to different languages and regional conventions.
  • Right to Left (RTL) support provides correct layout and text flow for languages such as Arabic and Hebrew, ensuring accurate reading and presentation.
  • Searching text allows users to quickly find words or phrases within a document, improving navigation and usability for large or complex PDFs.
  • PDF Readers/PDF Viewers deliver accurate on-screen rendering of PDF files, supporting navigation, zooming, and page interaction.
  • Saving a PDF to a stream enables applications to write PDF output directly to memory or network streams, supporting efficient storage, transmission, and integration with external systems.

For an in-depth analysis of features and price, visit our WinForms PDF components comparison.

Explore WinForms PDF Reading and Writing Features

Improve Navigation with a Ribbon Layout

January 21, 2026
Enhance usability and productivity with a modern ribbon UI that organizes commands clearly and delivers fast, context-aware access.

Ribbons provide a structured, visual command interface that organizes application features into clearly labeled tabs and groups, improving discoverability, efficiency, and usability. By surfacing frequently used and context-aware commands, ribbons reduce navigation time and deliver a familiar, professional user experience. Commonly used in productivity software, data-driven applications, design tools, and enterprise systems, ribbon interfaces are ideal for applications with rich functionality where users need quick, intuitive access to a wide range of tools.

Several .NET WinForms UI suites offer ribbon control including:

For an in-depth analysis of features and price, visit our comparison of .NET WinForms UI suites.

Compare .NET WinForms UI Suites

Build DevExpress WinForms UIs inside Rider

January 15, 2026
DevExpress DXperience 25.2 adds Visual designers that integrate with JetBrains Rider to simplify WinForms UI configuration during development.

DevExpress DXperience is a comprehensive set of UI controls and developer productivity tools for building data-driven desktop and web applications using technologies such as WinForms, WPF, ASP.NET, Blazor and JavaScript, focusing on consistent user experiences, advanced data visualization, reporting, dashboards, and design-time features that support the development and long-term maintenance of complex business applications.

The DevExpress DXperience 25.2 release introduces JetBrains Rider support, allowing developers to visually configure and customize major DevExpress UI WinForms components directly within Rider’s designer environment. This integration brings familiar design-time experiences to teams using Rider, making it easier to adjust layouts, component properties, and UI behavior without leaving the IDE. By aligning DevExpress visual designers with Rider, the update supports faster iteration, clearer UI intent, and a more consistent development experience across tools.

DevExpress DXperience is licensed per developer and is available as a Perpetual License with a 12 month support and maintenance subscription. See our DevExpress DXperience licensing page for full details.

For more information, visit our DevExpress DXperience product page.

Control App Behavior with AI Prompts

January 13, 2026
DevExpress Universal 25.2 adds a new API that lets apps interpret user intent and apply changes directly to UI components and logic at runtime.

DevExpress Universal is a comprehensive suite of UI components and developer tools that supports the creation of feature-rich applications across web, desktop, and mobile platforms, including .NET, JavaScript, Blazor, ASP.NET, WinForms, WPF, and MAUI. It focuses on delivering consistent user interfaces, advanced data visualization, reporting, dashboards, and productivity features that help teams design, build, and maintain complex applications using a unified set of technologies and patterns.

DevExpress Universal v25.2 introduces AI Tool Calling (Natural Language Control for UI Components), a cross-platform feature that extends Microsoft.Extensions.AI tool-calling to enable natural-language interaction with application UI and logic. Developers can expose UI components, ViewModels, and business services as AI-invokable tools, grouped into dynamic toolsets that adapt to the application’s current context. When users interact through the DevExpress AI Chat Control, the language model interprets their request, selects the appropriate tool, resolves the target instance, and executes the action in real time, making applications easier to use while giving developers full control over what the AI can see and do.

DevExpress Universal is licensed per developer and is available as a Perpetual License with a 12 month support and maintenance subscription. See our DevExpress Universal licensing page for full details.

For more information, visit our DevExpress Universal product page.

Capture PDF Content Through the Viewer

December 30, 2025
Enable apps to extract user-selected text and regions directly from PDF documents, aligning retrieved data with visible on-screen interactions.

Extracting content using a PDF Viewer refers to enabling end users or applications to select and retrieve content directly through the viewer’s user interface, based on interactive actions such as text selection, area selection, or page-level capture. For software developers, this means the viewer acts not only as a rendering surface but also as a controlled extraction layer that exposes selected text, images, or regions. This approach is valuable in review, approval, and data capture scenarios because it reflects explicit user intent, aligns extracted data with what is visibly selected on screen, and avoids reliance on background parsing alone, resulting in more predictable and user-driven content retrieval within applications.

Several WinForms PDF Viewer components allow content extraction, including:

  • DevExpress WinForms PDF Viewer (part of DevExpress WinForms) allows you to extract user-selected text and visual regions directly through the PDF viewer.
  • Telerik UI for WinForms PDF Viewer (part of Telerik UI for WinForms) allows you to capture visually selected PDF content in the viewer, returning text aligned with user interactions.
  • PDFView4NET Windows Forms Edition by PDF4DEV Solutions facilitates extracting text, images, and regions directly from its PDF viewer based on  user selections.
  • Syncfusion WinForms PDF Viewer (part of Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise) lets you retrieve user-selected PDF text and areas via the viewer.

For an in-depth analysis of features and price, visit our comparison of WinForms PDF Viewer components.

Compare WinForms PDF Viewer Components