What Is New in Windows Forms 14.2

Jason Beres [Infragistics] / Tuesday, October 14, 2014

We are very excited about all the new controls and updates coming in our huge Windows Forms release for 14.2. As you will see through out our other platforms, there are three main areas we are focusing on across all major toolsets: 

  • Touch Everywhere, Office Inspired Apps on Every Platform 
  • Deliver Outstanding Experiences with Awesome Branding and Styling 
  • Developer Productivity Across Every Device, Every Platform 

 

With more than 100+ controls, Infragistics Windows Forms is the most mature, fully-featured Windows Forms Product on the market. With features that cover every aspect of enterprise software development including Microsoft Office Style user interfaces, high performance dashboards and reports, and full modern experiences with touch & gestures. 

 

Touch Everywhere, Office Inspired Apps on Every Platform 

In our continued effort to bring you the greatest in Office Inspired Applications on every platform with an awe-inspiring touch experience we are are delivering three brand new controls in our 14.2 release. Our team as done a great job to help improve your productivity while also modernizing your applications with our new Carousel, DataChart and Flat Data Source. 

 

Windows Forms Carousel Controls

 

[New Control] Carousel 

In an effort to improve the users productivity and navigation, we are introducing the new Carousel control for Windows Forms, similar to our XamlCarousel.  A list of items are displayed for the user in a tile-like fashion along a predefined path. The control will allow the user to activate an item and navigate from one active item to another with animation. In addition it will allow the developer to provide a custom path for the items to be rendered on. This control will come complete with a great touch experience and panning gestures that all users want. 

 

Windows Forms Touch Carousel

<p"><p"><p">This tool will allow to developer to:

  • Show a list of clickable items along a specified path 
  • Style the items (Normal, Active and HotTracked) 
  • Provide a Custom Path 
  • Allow the control to automatically rotate the items along the path 
  • Add items to the carousel control by manually adding items to the controls collection or by binding the control to a bindable datasource.

 

Windows Forms Carousel

 

 

[New Control] DataChart Control


We are very exited to get this new DataChart control out the door to you that will have a vast majority of features available right off the bat. Along with being able to create composite charts and use multiple series there will be a vast variety of series you as the user will be able to chose from:  

  • Line, Stacked Line, Stacked 100-Line Series, Area, Stacked Area, Stacked 100-Area, Bar, Stacked Bar Series, Stacked 100-Bar, Column, Stacked Column, Stacked 100-Column, Point, Spline, Spline Area, Stacked Spline Area, Stacked 100-Spline Area, Step Line, Stacked Spline, Stacked 100-Spline, Step Area, Range Area, Range Column, Waterfall, Bubble/Proportional Symbol, Scatter/Scatter Plot, Scatter Line, Scatter Spline, Polar(Area, Line, Scatter, Spline, Spline Area), Radial(Line, Area, Column, Pie), Candlestick, OHLC. 

 

Windows Forms Live Data Chart

 

The DataChart will come with 34 Financial Indicators such as Average True Ranger Indicator, Force Index Indicator and Positive Volume Indicator. On top of that, there are 13 different trend lines you can choose from and 2 financial overlays.

  • Trend Lines: CubicFit, CumulativeAverage, ExponentialAverage, ExponentialFit, LinearFit, LogarithmicFit, ModifiedAverage, PowerLawFit, QuadraticFit, QuarticFit, QuinticFit, SimpleAverage, WeightedAverage. 
  • Financial Overlays: Bollinger Bands Overlay, Price Channel Overlay

 

Windows Forms Chart

 The Axes comes with support for multiple axes and datetime axis, zooming for both single and multi-axis and zoom interaction with mousewheel and window drag (Mouse / Touch). The user will be able to scale the axis both linearly and logarithmically and cross axis values. Besides being able to support chart title, subtitle, axis titles, text rotation, gridlines and radial chart y-axis the user will also be able to create multiple legends. 

 

[New Control] Flat Data Source


To help prevent developers from getting discouraged by the complexity associated with the production of OLAP data, configuration of an OLAP server and so on the FlatDataSource class can be used to display ‘non-OLAP’ style data in the WinPivotGrid. Instead of generating data from a server-based OLAP data adapter that is based on values stored in an SSAS database, the FlatDataSource obtains its data from an IEnumerable implementation. This compresses a list of items, which each item referencing an instance of a .NET class. 

For example, say you as a developer have sales data contained within a collection of 'Order.' objects can instantiate a FlatDataSource instance with this collection. Call the call the FlatDataSource’s GenerateCube method, call the InitializeAsync method, and assign a reference to the FlatDataSource instance to the WinPivotGrid’s DataSource property. 

Windows Forms Flat Data Source

Deliver Stunning with Awesome Branding and Styling 

PivotGrid

New Default Color Scheme for Pivot Grid

Along with being able to slice, dice and filter data any way the user wants they can now view their Pivot Grid in a Compact View just like you can in the WPF Pivot Grid. This will help provide users with a better way to look at their data when they have a lot of fields and avoid having a bulky layout.

Windows Forms Themes

User-Resizable Headers in Row Area 

In an effort to give the user more control over their data in the PivotGrid you can now resize the headers in the row area. 

RightToLeft Support 

Building off the progress made in 14.1 we have implemented right-to-left support in a few more controls to help care for languages such as Arabic and Hebrew.  These controls include Grid, Combo and DropDown and WinTree. 

Windows Forms Right to Left Support

Developer Productivity Across Every Device, Every Platform

Samples Browser Feature Samples Page


[Coded UI Tests] Support for VS2012

 

Since the release of 12.2 our Windows Forms controls have begun to participate with the Microsoft Coded UI Test Framework to allow record and replay of automated tests. This extension is a technology manager that tells Coded UI Tests to use UI Automation for Infragistics controls, and not to use the older Microsoft Active Accessibility by default. In the new 14.2 release Coded UI Test will now Support Visual Studio 2012.
The Coded UI Test’s record and replay actions support the following controls:

  • WinButton, WinCheckEditor, WinCombo, WinComboEditor, WinDateTimeEditor, WinDropDown, WinExplorerBar, WinFormattedLinkLabel, WinFormattedTextEditor, WinGrid, WinMaskedEdit, WinOptionSet, WinPictureBox, WinProgressBox, WinProgressBar, WinScrollBar, WinStatusBar, WinTextEditor, WinTrackBar, WinTree, WinToolBarsManager


 

Summary

I hope you are as excited to get your hands on this as we were in building it!  There are a ton of features across the board in 14.2, i want to assure you that Windows Forms continues to be a big investment area for us. 

We are continuing to deliver the best Windows Forms controls on the market today, with a big focus in three key areas:

  • Touch Everywhere, Office Inspired Apps on Every Platform
  • Deliver Outstanding Experiences with Awesome Branding & Styling
  • Developer Productivity across Every Device, Every Platform

 

To get started with all this goodness, download Infragistics Ultimate 14.2. today from here:

https://www.infragistics.com/products/ultimate

To see all of the new Windows Forms features, go here:

https://www.infragistics.com/products/windows-forms

If you have any feedback, please send me an email to jasonb@infragistics.com, and as always please use our Product Ideas page to include product feature suggestions for future releases.