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!

LightSpeed

• Fix for designer DTO compilation error if entities were declared internal
• Fix for ordering a query on a property of an associated entity when the association is declared in a derived class and the mapping mode is class table inheritance
• Fix for LINQ projections on SimpleDB
• Fix for generation SQL Compact blob columns from designer
• Fix for inequality comparisons and unique validations on SimpleDB
• Added a feature to the VS2010 designer to warn if the project targets the .NET Client Profile
• Fixed an issue where an empty linked model caused a compiler error
• Fixed “arrows to nowhere” when using external class references in VS2010 designer
• Fixed spurious table creation with auto through entities with ambiguously singular/plural names

WPF Elements

• Added an option to TimePicker to auto-refresh the list of suggested times

All these fixes and features are included in the currently downloadable nightly builds — free editions from the downloads page, retail editions from the store.

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!

LightSpeed

• Added support for ToString() and Convert.ToString() in LINQ expressions
• Fix for aliasing issue in joins
• Removed some validation options from the designer for data types where they didn’t make sense (for example, length validations on boolean properties)
• Fixed an issue with using SqlXxx data types that was causing problems for SQL Server 2008 spatial queries
• Support composite (&& and ||) expressions in Where Any and All clauses. (Limited to a single && or || on VistaDB due a parameter handling issue.)
• Added support for projections in join criteria
• Added support for scoped subqueries in a LINQ Where clause
• Fixed an issue with scalar queries in class table inheritance, which also affected unique validations
• Support Query.Identifier in “update by query”

WPF Elements

• Added a 24-hour clock display option, Maximum and Minimum constraints, TimeSuggestionInterval option and input masking to the TimePicker control
• Fixed an issue with separator display in numeric text boxes

Silverlight Elements

• Added an ObservableDictionary class

These fixes and enhancements are in the current nightly builds — grab the free editions from the downloads page or the retail editions from the store.

Here’s a tour of what’s new. For more details, you can see the Silverlight Elements announcement or the Silverlight Elements product site. We’ll be updating the WPF Elements site and documentation when we roll these into a formal release.

Dual Slider

The DualSlider has all the main features of a standard WPF Slider, and also provides an additional slider thumb. This makes it useful for selecting the start and end values of some kind of numerical range. You can display the control horizontally or vertically, and constrain the slider values and the range between them. Tick marks can be displayed above or/and below the slider track, the spacing between the tick marks can be changed, and you can also specify whether or not the slider thumbs should snap to the tick marks.

Dual Progress Bar

The built-in WPF ProgressBar control provides a way to show the progress of an operation, but what if you also want to show the progress of individual sub-operations within that larger operation? That’s where the DualProgressBar comes in, providing a means to show a second progress bar within the main one. Even if you don’t need to show sub-operations, you can still use this control as an enhanced version of a normal ProgressBar: for example, to display custom content at the start, center and end of the bar.

Split Button

This control combines a button and a menu. It’s useful when you’ve got multiple related commands, but one of the commands is a common default whereas the others are less common and can be tucked away. The SplitButton provides quick access to the common command via the button, but can be dropped down to reveal a menu of further commands.

Outlook Bar

If you’ve used Microsoft Outlook, you’ll be familiar with this attractive and space-efficient way of displaying tabs. The OutlookBar displays its tabs in a stack, which can be used to select what content it should display, but also allows the user to resize the amount of space allocated to the tabs, automatically collapsing tabs if there’s not enough room to show them fully.

Time Picker and Time Span Picker

These two controls are useful for things like diary or scheduling applications. The TimePicker control provides a way for the user to select a time of day, and supports a configurable drop-down list of suggestions. A related control is the TimeSpanPicker, which allows the user to select a duration. TimeSpanPicker displays time spans nicely as a number of minutes, hours, days or weeks as appropriate.

Themes

Needless to say, all of these controls are provided in all of the WPF Elements themes, so you can keep an elegant Expression or Office-style design that’s consistent with the existing Elements controls (and with WPF Themes for WPF’s built-in controls).

See anything you like?

Sounds useful? Grab the free trial of WPF Elements and try out the new controls. Want more? If you’ve got a control you’d like to see us offering, let us know in our forums and we’ll see what we can do!

WPF Elements

We’ve been continuing to enhance WPF Elements with some of the controls from our Silverlight Elements suite. Since the last bulletin we’ve added:

• SplitButton
• DualSlider
• OutlookBar

These controls are available in the current nightly build — check them out!

We’ve also fixed a bug where the IntegerTextBox.ValueChanged event was getting declared incorrectly.

LightSpeed

• The DateTime.Date property is now supported in LINQ queries on SQL Server 2008. (It’s been supported on Oracle and PostgreSQL since 2.2.)
• We’ve made some further tweaks in support of .NET Remoting.
• We’ve made a number of bug fixes around class table inheritance, including some fixes for incorrect joins and aliasing, and an error where the schema wasn’t being respected on derived classes.

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.

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!

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 :-)

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 =)