Binarymission Blog

Virtualizing Wrap Panel for WPF & Silverlight, Volume 2011: Plans

Guys – This is just a “heads up” on the next major version I am working on, for my Virtualizing Wrap panel control for WPF and Silverlight.

You can expect the following heavy-weight features in the control, soon:

• Out-of-the-box support for rendering items of varying size at the same time (currently the control already supports the feature of dynamic sizing of items via an eventing mechanism on scrolling in the viewport)
• Grouping of items
• Sorting of items
• Filtering of items : This will include automatic support for removing realized items from viewport (without affecting anything on the bound data context)
• Support for rendering items even when the root visual in the visual tree is a panel control that supplies Infinite size as the available size during the control’s layout pass (includes panels such as Stack panel, et al.)

This is a very technically complex and a very ambitious release for me!

I am planning to consolidate the release of this new version of the Virtualizing Wrap panel control along with the next major release of the Ribbon control (v 5.0) with support for Backstage view feature and more design-time features (for both Blend and VS 2010), as UIControlSuite .NET Release 14 Volume 2011.

Excitement begins now… just a few more weeks of waiting time… … watch this space for a tentative date for this release.

Wish you all a very Prosperous and Happy New year 2011.

Cheers

Sundar

Organization Chart .NET control: A New WPF 4 & Silverlight 4 control released

Guys, I have put together a new WPF and Silverlight 4 control named OrganisedTree .NET.
This is a control that you would want to use for presenting a very visually engaging tree-view style data.
It will take your hierarchical data and present it using cascading linkage between various levels of nodes, at the same time supporting highlighting the path to currently selected node.

Some uses of this control are scenarios such as displaying Corporate Organisation charts, and such.

The control boasts tons of features, all of which are very easy to setup, straight in XAML - absolutely no procedural coding required.

The core features of these controls (both WPF and Silverlight 4 variants) include:

• Out-of-the-box support for Organisation chart style hierarchical data display. This means you don;t have to mess with the standard .NET WPF/Silverlight TreeView control ‘s styling/re-templating changes.

You could simply drag-and-drop OrganisedTree .NET control into your design surface, and ask it to render your hierarchical data in a Organisation chart style mode, by doing absolutely nothing (other than setting up your hierarchical data for the control – which you will do anyway!)

• Supports two mode of tree rendering: Top-To-Bottom, and Bottom-To-Top
• Easy to setup/use in your applications: The control's object model is similar to .NET TreeView, but only more awesome :)
• High performance rendering: The control is written from scratch engineered for high performance rendering , and does not derive from the .NET WPF/Silverlight TreeView controls
• Supports rendering the Selected path with a custom brush
• Supports Expand/collapse of nodes for children display
• Supports setting up custom data for drawing the nodes connecting lines and its color
• Supports drawing a custom path (instead of just a line object)
• Supports enabling or disabling drawing connecting lines between nodes
• The control also allows you to setup custom length for drawing teh connecting lines between sibling and parent/child nodes 
• Global and node- level styling is supported, so you can customise the look-and-feel of the nodes at each level
• Drag and Drop support built-in
• Enhanced design-time experience supported: I have written custom design-time assemblies specific to both Visual Studio 2010 and Blend 4 IDEs so that it will be easy to setup the control visually without ever writing a single line of code or XAML even!

I have released the first version of these controls as part of Release 13.6 of UIControlSuite .NET Release 13.6.

More jaw-dropping features in the OrganisedTree.NET control, and some more new controls for WPF 4 and Silverlight 4 "on the works" as we speak :)

The product page is here.

Enjoy Release 13.6, and have fun!

- Sundar

WPF Ribbon control custom PRISM RegionAdapter class now available.

Guys, i have written a RegionAdapterBase<Binarymission.WPF.Controls.WindowControls.BinaryRibbonBarPanel> type implementation class library (for both WPF and Silverlight) for use in your WPF PRISM based projects, and is now available to all customers.

Retail customers will have got a copy of this by now, on first priority basis :)

- Sundar

New Silverlight and WPF Pixel Shaders “effects” library released

Considering the fact my customers crazily love my SlideShow control’s custom PixelShader effects, i have made a separate class library containing these effects – one for Silverlight and one for WPF, so you can use these “cool Effects” on any UIElement in your applications :)… Have fun.

- Sundar

UIControlSuite Release 12 is now available

Wish you all a very happy new year 2010 :-)

UIControlSuite Release 12 is now out and available from 4th Jan 2010.

The release includes 2 new controls – An outlook 2007 like Scheduler control for both WPF and Silverlight 3.

Also included in the package are Stunning 10 new Slideshow transition effects written using High Level Shading Language (HLSL) pixel shader.

The release also contains loads of other enhancements across suite controls, and some bug fixes.

Read more of the new features in Release 12 release notes.

Docking Library for WPF and Silverlight 3

I did plan to release the docking library for WPF and Silverlight 3 in this release, but could not make it to the date, because much of the time had been spent on completing the Scheduler control for WPF and Silverlight.

I am expecting to release my docking library for WPF and Silverlight 3, in the upcoming release 13, which is due in a few weeks time.

Enjoy Release 12 :-)

Stay tuned!

- Sundar

Binarymission's entry into ASP.NET MVC controls market :-)

I am also a big fan of the ASP.NET MVC web development platform, and given that this new framework has a huge gap in terms of "ready to use" stunning business UI components, I have decided to take a plunge into this market as well, and produce something cool of business value... and the first candidate control that came to mind was a high-profile ASP.NET MVC compliant Grid control. 

With this new product in our product suite, we will have offerings across all the four major MS UI technologies: Windows Forms, WPF, Silverlight 3, and ASP.NET MVC .NET :-)

BinaryMVCGrid .NET for ASP.NET MVC framework is currently being designed as a very light-weight, AJAX enabled high performance grid control, built specifically to suit the programming model of the ASP.NET MVC framework.

The design is focused heavily on making this grid control highly performance optimised, keeping in mind that the UI features are going to be a lot.

BinaryMVCGrid .NET MVC component will have rich feature set that will include the following:

• Numerous easy to setup options for formatting data
• Capability to display nested grids to visualize (FK) foreign key relationships
• Highly scalable mode of data paging: thereby building a JSON mode paging
• Out-of-the-box data pager control
• Support for CRUD operations
• Extended Grouping of data; including allowing grouping of data in multiple modes, viz., the programmatic manner, as well as allowing your end-users to visually drag-and-drop grid column headers into the control's specially provided group-drop area)
• Column sorting
• Extended client-side interactions rendering, including customisable styling of cells, rows, and columns selection by the grid end-user.

I am planning to make available this new ASP.NET MVC 2.0 control as part of my UIControlSuite .NET Enterprise edition Release 13 next year.

Stay tuned :-)

- Sundar

UIControlSuite .NET Release 12 highlights

Yes, a quick hint on what is coming in my next major release of UIControlSuite .NET build: Release 12.

New WPF and Silverlight 3 .NET controls

• Rich Windows Docking library for both WPF and Silverlight:

BinarySmartDock .NET - A comprehensive docking library for WPF: with full support for dockable & floating windows, collapsed groups, 3D document switching (like Vista's Flip-3d), and capable of letting you serialise docking layout across application sessions.

• A MS Outlook styled Scheduler control for WPF and Silverlight 3

• Enhancements to SlideShow control (for both WPF and Silverlight variants)

Stunning 10 new SlideShow transition effects written using High Level Shading Language (HLSL) pixel shader.
The WPF version of these new transition effects will be rendered using the GPU (where possible), thereby providing extra-ordinary performance during transitions.

Additional features

• Enhanced Design time experience for all of our WPF controls
  for both Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 3, so you can setup the controls fully without having to write any C# or XAML code yourself :-)
• More C# sample projects for all of the WPF and Silverlight controls

Stay tuned!

- Sundar

UIControlSuite .NET Release 11.1 available now :-)

Wahooo! Yes, I have now released UIControlSuite .NET Release 11.1.

This release contains 4 new controls, 1 new control for Silverlight 3, and 3 new WPF controls, viz.:

1. A SlideShow .NET control, for both WPF and Silverlight 3

2. A very cute and customisable Glass button control for WPF, that is very useful for creating applications like that of a SlideShow app.

3. A Control Visual Re-sizer control for WPF.

I will take a little break for now, and soon get back into the development sprint of the next release - I will possibly version it as Release 12 :-)... since there are some major enhancements coming in that release.

For now, enjoy Release 11.1, and stay tuned!

- Sundar

UIControlSuite Release 11 plans

Well, as planned, the Release 11 of UIControlSuite .NET will be released during this month, and I have decided to release it in two volumes: Volume 1 and 2.

Volume 1 will be released on 13th August, and will contain the following new controls:

New WPF controls

BinarySlideShow .NET
BinaryControlResizer .NET

New Silverlight 3 .NET controls

BinarySlideShow .NET

You can read a lot more on the BinarySlideShow .NET control from my earlier blog post here.

 

Release 11 Volume 2 will contain all the remaining bits of new controls and enhancements as detailed in this earlier post.

Stay tuned! Release 11 of UIControlSuite .NET is coming close :-)

- Sundar

Release 10.5 - New Silverlight 3 .NET control: UI Virtualizing Wrap Panel

Yep! :-) I could not resist the temptation... so here you go... I have now built a new control for Silverlight 3: A "UI virtualizing" Wrap Panel control, which has now been released as Release 10.5.

I had planned this control as part of Release 11 package though… well… nothing wrong to “push out” a part of the release - a bit early :-)

This control will be the world's first Virtualizing Wrap Panel control for Silverlight 3 :-)

The control is based on my popular UI Virtualizing Wrap Panel control for WPF (which is also the world first of its kind for WPF platform).

Microsoft had certainly listened to some of my earlier rant on the missing bits that I had needed to do this control :-)... So thanks to "Redmond buddies" too on this :-)

That said, the porting of my WPF code to Silverlight 3 was not that straight-forward anyway (the SL3 RTM still was not exactly in sync with the WPF version of ItemsControl and the core VirtualizingPanel classes), but anyway, I have managed to get my SL 3 control done with my own code bits to fill the gap :-) Ha!

In terms of features, this Silverlight 3 control is exactly the same as the WPF one.

The new Silverlight 3 .NET control has now been released as UIControlSuite .NET Release 10.5... so you are welcome to come and grab your copy! :-)

You can also see a live demo of this control "in action" here:

http://www.binarymission.co.uk/binaryvirtwrappanelsl3/BinaryVirtualizingWrapPanelSLApplicationDemo.html

Note: You will need Silverlight 3 RTM to run the demo.

 

Out-of-Browser install of the application demonstration!

The online demonstration application has been configured to be run Out-of-browser (OOB feature of Silverlight 3), so you can install the demo on to your local machine/laptop by just right clicking on the application demo page, and invoking the command "Install BinaryVirtualizingWrapPanel for SL 3 onto this computer...".

 

Enjoy Release 10.5! :-)

-Sundar