Archive for the ‘News’ Category

WPF Elements 3.0 beta

Tagged as News, Products, WPF Elements, WPF Property Grid

We’re pleased to announce that a beta build of WPF Elements 3.0 is now available to existing WPF Elements, WPF Property Grid and WPF Themes customers.

WPF Elements is our suite of controls for Windows Presentation Foundation and in 3.0 we’re not only bundling in the popular Property Grid control and our stylish WPF themes, we’re also adding a whole load of new controls:

• Scheduler – Outlook-style calendar display
• DualProgressBar – display operation and sub-operation progress
• DualSlider – a handy and visual way for users to select a range
• OutlookBar – an attractive and compact tab control
• PaletteColorPicker – help your users select colors that work well together
• SplitButton – it’s a button! It’s a menu! No, it’s a benu! Or possibly a menton
• TimePicker – for selecting a time of day
• TimeSpanPicker – for selecting a duration
• RichTextToolBar – a convenient and familiar UI for formatting the WPF RichTextBox

The PropertyGrid control has also been enhanced with new themes, and WPF Themes extends these to the built-in WPF controls.

The WPF Elements 3.0 beta is in the store now and is free to current WPF Elements, WPF Property Grid and WPF Themes customers. Take it for a spin and if you run into any issues, let us know!

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 26 July 2010

VS File Explorer beta for Visual Studio 2010

Tagged as News, Products, VS File Explorer

If you’re familiar with our free Visual Studio File Explorer product, and you’ve started the move to Visual Studio 2010, you’ll no doubt be missing the Explorer integration already. (And if you’re not familiar with VS File Explorer, check it out!)

Well, good news! Dedicated engineers* have been labouring day and night** ever since Visual Studio 2010 came out***, and we’re now able to offer a beta release of VS File Explorer for Visual Studio 2010.

The beta release is available for free download now. Take it for a spin and let us know how you get on!

* Actual number of engineers and level of dedication may differ from that printed on promotional material.
** Actual working hours may differ from those printed on promotional material.
*** Actual project duration may differ from that printed on promotional material.

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 22 July 2010

Mindscape teams up with ComponentSource

Tagged as General, News, Products

We’re pleased to announce that ComponentSource and Mindscape have teamed up to promote Mindscape products through the ComponentSource websites and online media channels.

This is great news for organisations that have reseller policies, policies around making purchases from local organisation (we’re looking at you, US businesses!) and US Government organisations.

Currently ComponentSource have LightSpeed and Silverlight Elements available on their websites. It is possible for users to add reviews so if you’d like to share your experiences with our products we would appreciate you adding your review on ComponentSource.

If you have any questions please post a comment.

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 12 July 2010

WPF Elements 3.0 – Important notice for WPF customers

Tagged as News, Products, WPF, WPF Elements, WPF Property Grid

In the next couple of weeks we will be shipping WPF Elements 3.0, it will be the largest shake up to our WPF product line up to date and is great news for all our WPF Elements, WPF Property Grid and WPF Themes customers. Personally, I can’t wait to see this update come out and see some of the great applications that people will build with all the upgraded offering! :-)

Some important notes about the new release that all WPF customers should be aware of:

WPF Property Grid

We will be merging our WPF Property Grid control into the WPF Elements family. It will no longer be a stand alone product to purchase from our store. It’s interesting and a little sad to see it go as its own standalone product as it was Mindscape’s second product that was released to market but it’s also an important step in continuing maturity of our WPF offering.

What does this mean for existing customers? If you own the WPF Property Grid product you will automatically be migrated to owning WPF Elements 3.0 as part of your active subscription for free.

WPF Themes

We released a WPF Themes product that included 5 themes for all the built in WPF controls. We’ve decided that this would be better bundled up with WPF Elements 3.0 as well and will also be discontinuing the WPF Themes individual product when WPF Elements 3.0 is released.

What does this mean for existing customers? If you own the WPF Themes product you will automatically be migrated to owning WPF Elements 3.0 as part of your active subscription for free.

WPF Elements 3.0

Beyond doing the product line up tango, WPF Elements will also get a big upgrade by way of new features in existing controls and new control additions. We’ve received wonderful feedback from customers about what they would like to see added (for example, a WPF Scheduler control like the Outlook calendar) and I’m looking forward to seeing how customers make use of them.

Price changes – the call-to-action part of this post!

With WPF Elements 3.0 we will be increasing the price of the product which is why we’re making this announcement now. If you are currently evaluating any of our WPF products then it would be a very good idea to purchase a 12 month subscription today and lock in the current pricing for the next 12 months. If you already have a subscription, you may wish to extend it for another 12 months now. This will represent a substantial saving over buying the products or renewing them once WPF Elements 3.0 is released. Also, note that if you have an inactive subscription, you can still re-activate it and renew for 12 months at a reduced amount from your account page.

Existing customers can extend their subscriptions here
Cannot-wait-to-be-customers can purchase from the store here

We hope that you’ll love the new WPF Elements when we launch it later in July.

Happy coding!

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 8 July 2010

Nightly news, 28 May 2010

Tagged as LightSpeed, News, Silverlight Elements, WPF Diagramming

We’ve not posted a Nightly News for a couple of weeks because we’ve been shipping releases rather than nightlies — see the Silverlight Elements 1.1 and LightSpeed 3.1 announcements. Still, here’s what’s new and not in those releases.

LightSpeed

• We’ve fixed a bug with ordering on group keys that were obtained by traversals.
• We’ve fixed an error that occurred in certain join-and-project scenarios if your entity had a property name that was the same as a property name that could be translated to SQL.
• Fixed a spurious warning relating to a designer option

WPF Diagramming

• Extensibility improvements to the connection remover and relocator
• Fixed a couple of cropping issues in image export

Silverlight Elements

• Resolved an issue relating to the order that properties were set in the Slider and DualSlider when using XAML

We’ve also got work in progress on our WPF Diagramming products and on porting some of the cool new Silverlight Elements controls to WPF. We’ll bring you an update on those as soon as they’re available.

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 27 May 2010