Archive for the ‘WPF Elements’ Category

WPF Elements 2.0 is here!

We’re proud to announce the release of WPF Elements 2.0, the latest version of our package of controls for Windows Presentation Foundation. WPF Elements 2.0 includes four great new controls to quickly provide an even richer user experience to your applications, five good looking themes based on Microsoft Office and Expression Blend and many enhancements to the Elements 1.0 controls.

CoverFlow

CoverFlow is a list control that presents the selected item front and centre, with the unselected items arranged in a pseudo-perspective view around it. It provides a visually attractive and nicely animated way to present visual collections such as collections of photos, pictures or charts.

You can read more about CoverFlow, with link to a live demo, here.

ColorPicker

The ColorPicker control allows users to select colors in three different ways:

• Standard colors: a list of the built-in WPF colors displayed as a list of swatches along with their common names.
• Custom colors: allows users to mix their own colors using sliders or text boxes to specify the red, green, blue and alpha channels.
• Palette mode: similar to the color picker seen in Microsoft Office. This allows you to define the palette for your application so as to encourage users towards choices that work well together. You can customise the palette contents, arrangement and tooltips.

Here’s the palette view, showing a colour palette appropriate for modern graphic designs:

Here’s the custom color mode that gives the user full control to mix their own color. The colors on each of the sliders change dynamically making it very easy to see how changing each color channel will affect the result.

By providing your own style for the ColorPicker control, you can define which modes are available, style each mode however you like, or even have the ColorPicker displayed inside a window instead of a drop down.

AutoCompleteBox

The AutoCompleteBox helps to save typing and reduce errors by providing users with suggestions as they type. The user can quickly choose a suggestion with the arrow keys and thus “auto-complete” their entry.

To avoid confusing the user with too many suggestions, you can configure the AutoCompleteBox to limit the maximum number of suggestions to display at a time, and also not to display any suggestions until the user has typed a reasonable number of characters. You can also implement your own suggestion provider to perform custom matches, for example against custom sources such as the file system or using custom strategies such as matching initials (e.g. for WL suggest WriteLine).

PromptDecorator

This control can be attached to other controls to display a prompt telling the user what the control is for. The prompt is overlaid on the other control, conserving screen space and giving a smooth modern appearance, but disappears when the user clicks on the control so as to keep the control free of clutter when the user wants to type into it. The PromptDecorator can easily be styled to customize the look of the prompt allowing it to display images as well as text.

Here is the PromptDecorator being used in 4 different ways. The first one is simply being applied to a TextBox. The second one is also applied to a TextBox, but has been given a custom prompt template to include the magnifying glass. The next one shows the PromptDecorator being applied to an editable ComboBox. And the last one is being applied to the AutoCompleteBox.

Take it for a spin

If you have .NET 3.5 installed and want to have a play around with all of the controls included in WPF Elements, then you can see it live here. This also shows the cool new themes. You can also download a trial copy to try it out in your own applications.

We are always open for suggestions for improving these controls or ideas of more controls that you want to see. Put up a post on our forum and let us know!

Improved support options for customers

Hand in hand with our recent volume discounts and LightSpeed 3.0 release we have started to put in place an improved support capability for customers who need priority support options or may occasionally want to escalate support beyond what we normally offer.

Tooting our own horn a little, we have had very positive feedback from many customers who have said our support is fantastic. We hope this addition helps us maintain end user happiness as we continue to grow and our support load scales up.

What is priority support?

Priority support is the option to ensure that your request is dealt with promptly, and is reviewed before and prioritised over normal forum posts. It is also useful for folks who wish to not use the forum which is quite open and may not be viable for talking about sensitive parts of a software system.

Can I use it for feature requests?

No, we still urge that feature requests be posted in the forums so that others may discuss them (and because we don’t think it’s fair to charge you for suggesting cool features!). Features are still only added to products at our discretion.

How much does priority support cost?

We have priced support at $199 USD per priority support issue OR at $499 for a 5 pack of support issues, a 50% saving. You will be able to see if you have support tickets in your store account page. We have been issuing 1 priority support ticket per customer to LightSpeed 3.0 customers and upgrading Enterprise Edition customers. For other products, we’re in the process of migrating Enterprise customers to have a priority ticket added to their account.

The pricing is designed to be very cost effective and is inexpensive compared to the support options offered for other software (for example, one commercial NHibernate support vendor quotes 600 Euro, approximately $870 USD, per incident for ad hoc support).

You can purchase Priority support tickets in our online store.

Do I need it? Should I put all my requests through priority support?

If you need a guaranteed response, or a quick response is crucial to you, or you don’t want to discuss your issue on the public forum, then you should put a request through priority support. The forum will still get monitored actively by Mindscape staff and questions will be answered, but there are no guarantees around response times (our response times have usually been pretty good, but never guaranteed!).

Priority support is for those times when you need additional help and you don’t want to rely on the forums. You are welcome to simply buy a support ticket as you need them for $199 USD however it may be wiser to simply purchase a 5 pack in order to save 50%.

If I’ve missed any questions you have then please post a comment – I’m happy to answer them :-)

WPF Themes

Today we have released our stylish new product: WPF Themes. Using these themes you can quickly get your applications looking attractive and modern with very little work involved.

If you have .Net 3.5 installed and your browser supports XBAPs then you can try out all the themes right here.

The pack includes themes based on the Microsoft Office and Expression applications so your users will find them familiar and easy to use.

WPF Themes comes with documentation to help you get started quickly, and a few samples demonstrating how to apply a theme to your applications. The samples can also be used to view how the themes look on all the various controls that they support.

Plus, if you’re looking to make your own themes for your WPF applications, WPF Themes is a great way to help you get started. The themes are provided as source code, so you can simply copy whichever theme you like, and modify it to suit your needs. All the XAML files are well structured containing easily noticed comments making it easy to find the style for the control you want to see. Across all five themes, the order of the styles are kept the same which makes it easy to compare them.

WPF Themes is available to try out and buy today. Mega Pack customers will find WPF Themes available for download in the next few days.

Using WPF PropertyGrid or WPF Elements? The WPF Property Grid already includes two of these themes, and we’ll be shipping the remaining WPF Property Grid themes plus all five themes for Elements over the next few days.

If you have any queries about WPF Themes, or want help or advice with making your own themes then we would love to hear from you. Simply put a comment up on our WPF Themes support forum.
Happy styling =)

The New Zealand Hi-Tech Awards

It’s a bit late but now that we have some photos from the evening it seemed like a good time to make a post about the New Zealand Hi-Tech Awards. Two weeks ago Jeremy and I went to Christchurch to attend the Hi-Tech awards – we hadn’t entered Mindscape in the awards this year but I was put forward for the Young Achiever award.

I was fortunate enough to be a winner of the Young Achiever category along with Andrew Graham. Endace sponsored this award and so the award was given by Neil Hopkins of Endace (on the left):

Praise needs to go to the organisers and sponsors of the awards – celebration of business success and highlighting the importance of creating innovative technology companies in New Zealand is important. A memorable quote of the evening was that we need to be creating global businesses – something that I believe Mindscape truly is – over 95% of our customers are not in New Zealand. Thanks of course also goes to the rest of the Mindscape team and all those involved in the other ventures that we are part of.

Overall it was a great evening – we met some very interesting people, connected up with some we hadn’t seen in a while and stayed up way too late (in typical geek fashion, back at the hotel room afterwards Jeremy and I played some Unreal Tournament 2004 to which it became apparent I am not very good at playing when tired and full of wine!). Good Times!

Read more about the New Zealand Hi-Tech Awards here.

WPF Coverflow control released

I’m pleased to announce that we have just released a control that allows WPF developers to create a coverflow effect similar to what is available in iTunes.

Here’s a screenshot of the control in action:

So what can I do with it?

The control is very configurable and at a high level allows you to:

• Configure the size of the covers
• Alter the size or existence of the reflections
• Completely customise the look and feel of the covers with standard WPF styling techniques
• Alter the spacing between covers
• Alter the tilt of the covers

The control also works with all standard WPF capabilities – for example, binding to an ItemsSource property for the collection of covers. One other very cool feature is controlling what’s displayed on the cover – it can be any UIElement meaning you can host a video, image, other controls, whatever you want really!

How do I get it?

Here’s the great news – all customers of Mindscape WPF Elements already have it! We baked it into the nightly builds once it was polished and ready for release. If you’re a customer you can get it right now by clicking here.

If you’re not a customer but would like to test out the WPF Coverflow control, download the free trial of WPF Elements here (note, you must use the latest nightly, we will be bundling this into a final release version soon).

You can also see the WPF Coverflow control in action live within your browser by clicking here (requires .NET Framework 3.0 SP1 installed for XBAP support).

Let us know what you think!