Archive for the ‘Silverlight Elements’ Category

Nightly news, 25 June 2010

Tagged as LightSpeed, Silverlight Elements

New Zealand has shut down for the day because of the footie — even our Fearless Leader Mr Trask has taken the day off to watch it. However, his minions soldier on. Here’s this week’s batch of fixes and enhancements.

Silverlight Elements

We’ve added a new MultiCalendar control to Silverlight Elements, which allows you to display multiple months and select multiple dates, either as a range or as multiple dates or ranges.

LightSpeed

We’ve made several improvements around joins this week. You can now use multiple criteria in joins, and in LINQ you can conveniently express this by using an anonymous type as the join argument. We’ve also added some support for querying on through associations.

We’ve also provided a way to resize entities vertically in the designer, for those cases where you have an entity with very few properties but lots of associations. Vertical resizing isn’t turned on by default because it can impair usability, but if you have entities like this then you can read about the secret squirrel trick here.

Finally, we’ve released a number of minor fixes and tweaks:

• Auto through entities weren’t being given the right identity type when creating the database tables in the designer.
• We now allow migrations projects to be in solution folders rather than requiring them to be at the root.
• We’ve fixed an issue where the designer custom template path wasn’t being shown for editing if the .lsmodel file was in a subfolder. We’ve also fixed an issue with missing projects in a solution.
• Fixed support for the Visual Basic LINQ Group … By syntax.
• Some fixes for .Equals support in LINQ expressions.
• We have added partial support for discriminated derived types in assemblies other than the one which defines the base type. This only works in limited situations though — if you’ve got a more complex assembly arrangement then let us know.
• Fix for the designer not ignoring transient properties when creating a new database table.

As always, you can get the latest nightly builds from the My Account page in the store.

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 24 June 2010

Nightly news, 11 June 2010

Tagged as LightSpeed, Silverlight Elements, WPF Elements, WPF Property Grid

Lots of stuff going on at Mindscape HQ right now, but we’ve found time to deliver a few enhancements and bug fixes in the last week’s worth of nightly builds. Here’s the goodness.

WPF Elements

We’ve started porting some of the cool controls from Silverlight Elements to WPF, and the following are done and included in the current nightly build of WPF Elements:

• DualProgressBar
• TimePicker
• TimeSpanPicker

Other controls will be arriving in future nightlies — we expect to make a proper announcement next week.

LightSpeed

• We’ve added some checking to the designer to provide a more meaningful warning if you create an association to a concrete table inheritance base class.
• Fixed a problem with validation when using .NET remoting.
• Fixed a designer bug which prevented you from using the tree view to add CLR attributes.
• We’ve fixed a problem in optimistic concurrency checking where version information was being updated on a failed save. This fixes a related issue which could result in concurrency checking being fooled by repeated save attempts.
• Updated SQLite provider to version 1.0.66.

Silverlight Elements

• The RichTextEditor now supports changing the background colour.

WPF Property Grid

• Fixed an issue with dangling event handlers which could cause memory leaks or errors in collection scenarios.

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 10 June 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

Introducing Silverlight Elements 1.1

Tagged as Products, Silverlight, Silverlight Elements

We are proud to announce the release of Silverlight Elements 1.1. In this version we have added a whole bunch of interesting new controls to add an even richer user experience to your applications. All five of our current Silverlight themes have been updated to include all these new controls. We have also added new features to a few of the existing controls. The TimePicker and TimeSpanPicker controls now have up/down functionality and have the option to hide the drop down button. The Scheduler now supports custom schedule items which can be easily templated and added to the control.

Slider and Dual Slider

The Mindscape Slider control includes tick mark support as well as the usual Slider functionality. Tick marks can be displayed above or/and below the slider track, and the spacing between the tick marks can be changed. You can also specify whether or not the slider thumb should snap to the tick marks. The Slider can also be oriented vertically as well as horizontally.

The Mindscape DualSlider control includes all the features that we have put into the Slider, and also contains an additional slider thumb. This control is useful for selecting the start and end values or some kind of range. The thumbs can be moved either individually or at the same time by dragging the area between them. Various properties allow you to specify a minimum and maximum range, and also whether or not the thumbs are able to pass through each other.

You can read more information about the Slider and Dual Slider here, or play with them in our online demo.

Dock Panel

The DockPanel provides a layout strategy that arranges its children around the inside of its edges, like the WPF DockPanel. Individual items can be told which edge to be aligned against, and you can specify whether or not the last item should fill the remaining space or not. Have a look at the online demo where you can experiment with changing the width, height and dock properties of each of the items in the DockPanel.

Progress Bar

The Mindscape DualProgressBar can display the progress of individual sub-operations at the same time as the overall progress. If you don’t need to show the progress of an individual sub-operation, then you can still use this control as an enhanced version of a normal ProgressBar. Custom content can be displayed at the start, center and end of this control which can be text, images, bindings to the current progress or anything you fancy.

Read more information about the progress bar here, and have a look at it in the online demo.

Menu

The Menu control organises application commands into one easy to access location. This control is based on the familiar Windows menu component and makes is simple for users to discover what your application can do. Menus can include icons, checkable items and separators, and can be nested to provide a cascading menu effect. You can also set up particular menu items to remain open after the user has clicked on them.

You can read more information about the Menu control here, and see it in action with our online demo.

Split Button

This control is both a button and a menu combined. This control is useful when you have multiple related commands where one of the commands can be used as a default. The SplitButton acts like a button by raising an event when the user clicks on it. Further commands can be accessed from the drop down menu part of this control. Menu items can be added to the SplitButton in the same way they are added to a menu, and just like a menu the SplitButton supports cascading menus, icons and separators.

You can read more information about the SplitButton here, and see it in action with our online demo.

Expander

The Expander can tuck away its content and then display it only when the user wants to see it. This control is similar to the Expander seen in WPF and can accept any kind of visual content. You can also set it up to expand its content in an upward direction.

Outlook Bar

This control is a replica of the tab system seen in the Microsoft Outlook application. It displays a stack of tabs which can be used to select what content it should display. The thumb in this control can be dragged up and down to change the number of tabs that are visible. Tabs that have been collapsed can be seen in a smaller form in the tray at the bottom of the control. While collapsed, a tab can still be clicked to display its content. All the content and header content of each tab can be whatever you want it to be.

You can read more information about the OutlookBar here, and see it in action with our online demo.

Numeric Up Down

This is an ideal control for selecting a decimal value. The NumericUpDown displays a value which can be edited in a few different ways. The control is styled with a pair of buttons that can be used to increase or decrease the value by a specified magnitude. Clicking on the control and then using the up or down arrow keys will also increase or decrease the value. The user can even type directly into the control to input what ever number they need. This control can limit the users input by setting the minimum and maximum values, and the number of decimal places to display can also be set.

What do you think?

Looks useful? Try out the online demo and download the free trial version to give it a spin. And if there’s a new feature or control that would be useful for you, why not let us know in the forums? And you can get more information about Silverlight Elements here.

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Posted by Jason on 19 May 2010

Nightly news, 13 May 2010

Tagged as LightSpeed, News, Products, Silverlight Elements

A fairly brief update this week, as we’ll be making announcements about official releases in the next few days.

LightSpeed

• The designer now supports copying and pasting multiple properties in one operation.
• If you’re using associations to entities with composite keys and need to set up per-field column mappings, you can now do so in the designer. Instead of a single “Column Name” property on the association, you’ll see a “Column Name for X” property for each field of the composite key, e.g. “Column Name for EmployeeId” and “ColumnName for LocationId”.
• The designer no longer displays the discriminator settings when you’re using concrete table inheritance.
• We’ve fixed a couple of bugs: an issue with using constant boolean subexpressions in nested expressions in LINQ queries, a problem with multiple different joins over the same relationship and an issue with cascade delete on relationships that cross a class table inheritance hierarchy.

Silverlight Elements

• We’ve added a sample showing how to use the Scheduler control with a Web-based storage service.

As always, you can get the latest nightly builds from your account page in the store, or free versions from the Downloads page.

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 12 May 2010