Silverlight Controls New Features - 2010 Volume 1

In NetAdvantage® for Web Client: Silverlight for Line of Business 2010 Volume 1 we deliver a ZIP compression library, a new persistence framework for your controls, several Silverlight data grid features that help you deliver a more Microsoft® Excel®-like user experience, plus a Windows® 7 scenic ribbon for Silverlight and more!

xamWebRibbon™ – NEW!

Deliver an Aero-style Windows 7 scenic ribbon user interface to your users with xamWebRibbon. Using a scenic ribbon UI enables you to better organize your application's functionality into neat tabs, groups, menus, galleries and buttons. Show your users all of the wonderful amenities that a ribbon user interface has to offer, including the following:

Application Menu

A key differentiator of the scenic ribbon UI as it was introduced in Microsoft Windows 7 is the appearance of its application menu, and we replicate this exact same look and feel in our Silverlight scenic ribbon. Along with the ribbon's tabs and groups, the existence of an application menu alleviates the need for your application to display an old-fashioned main menu bar. All of the commands you used to keep in the main menu like File, Edit, View, etc., can now be placed into this sleek, scenic ribbon application menu.

Add Tabs and Groups

Tabs organize your application by presenting your users with high-level categorizations of your application's tasks. You can add ribbon groups to a tab to further organize the tasks into smaller, related clusters of tools.

Contextual Tabs

A contextual tab is a unique type of tab that only appears when your application is in a specific state. Users can then access the tools on the contextual tab to complete context-sensitive tasks. For example, in a paint program you may need to select a shape on its canvas, and once you select a shape there are new operations that become available to you such as applying a solid or gradient fill to the selected shape. This is an ideal example for when you would want to use a contextual tab--you won’t clutter the user interface with tools that become relevant only when the user has a shape selected and the user will have timely easy-access to the tools they would most likely need to use.

Dialog Box Launcher

An optional dialog box launcher can appear on the right-side of the caption in any ribbon group. When a user mouses over the launcher, it will highlight itself. This button will primarily be used to show a dialog.

Gallery Tool

While menus would provide your users with a text-based list of selectable items (sometimes adorned by an icon), the Gallery tool represents a quantum leap forward by providing a pictoral preview of the options available to the user. If you make frequent use of the Gallery tool, you will find our support for gallery item settings beneficial because you can make settings the default for all gallery items instead of having to apply it to each one individually. Galleries make a much more compelling user experience for browsing selections which lend themselves to being presented visually.

Group Variants

Through a collection of variants you can customize the types of resize behavior you want to occur when scenic ribbon groups shrink, and what their priority should be. For example, you can decide that you want the first reaction of the ribbon to a smaller size to be to hide its gallery preview. Next, your might reduce the image and text size of large tools on the ribbon to reduce the space it needs. It's a highly dynamic implementation of the Strategy pattern that lets you control how the scenic ribbon resizes when it shrinks.

Menu Tools

A menu tool is a dropdown list providing a number of selectable items, and the Silverlight scenic ribbon control supports three different kinds of menus:

• Menu – displays textual items inside a pop-up menu
• Segmented Menu - displays a button element that you can click to perform some action, and a drop down menu element that lists additional choices for actions to perform
• Segmented State Menu – behaves similar to the segmented menu, but the button can toggle between two states relating to its operation such as on and off

Radio Button Tool

You can use a radio button tool to display a group of mutually exclusive options to your users. For example, if the vertical alignment of a shape in a paint program can be set to top, middle or bottom then you might display a radio button tool to your users with three different options.

Quick Access Toolbar

Using the Silverlight scenic ribbon's Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) you can add tools that will be always accessible to your users, without regard to which tab is currently selected. Your users can also add tools to the QAT themselves by using the Customize Quick Access Toolbar menu to add tools that they think they will need readily available.

Key Tips

Normally when your users are trying to quickly access a main menu, they must remember various keystrokes or "mnemonics" typically starting by pressing the Alt key. Some menus anticipate any press of the Alt key as a reason to show certain letters that would complete the mnemonic in that menu as underlined. This is basically the idea behind key tips, but they are unique to the ribbon user interface. When you press F8 on Microsoft® Windows® (or CTRL on a Mac®), tooltips will appear over each Tab, Group and Tool (except those on the QAT) suggesting to you the keystrokes you need to activate them. If you press the appropriate key for a particular Tab, then that Tab will become active if it isn't already and Key Tips for that Tab's Groups are then displayed, and so on, until your user triggers the command they want.

xamWebGrid – Enhanced

We have enhanced the fastest Silverlight data grid available with new features that bridge the expanse between what your users are used to doing within a Microsoft® Excel® spreadsheet, and what you can deliver in your own Silverlight Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).

Excel-Style Filter Menu

When your Silverlight data grid has more data than is necessary for the task confronting a user, your user can now use our new Excel-style filtering menu to reduce how much data they have to look through. By simply clicking on the filter icon in a filterable column's header, your users may select from any of the unique values within that column. They can also build custom filter conditions or choose filter conditions from the following:

Conditional Formatting Engine

With the new Excel-style conditional formatting engine built into xamWebGrid you can apply a variety of rules-based conditional formatting styles to cells based on their value (e.g., when a value is in a certain range or above a certain critical threshold). Conditional formatting enables your users to more easily visualize values, locate their important data, identify exceptions and spot trends.

In addition to offering you a large number of conditional formatting rules that you can apply, you can also easily add two- and three-color gradient color scales, data bars, icon sets, and many other kinds of visualizations onto existing data columns to bring out the meaning from the numbers.

Unbound Columns

Unlike the databound columns you have been familiar with, an unbound column doesn't require being bound to a property of your underlying ItemsSource and this gives you freedom in displaying data values with greater flexibility. For example, you can use an unbound column to add a calculated column to your Silverlight data grid. All you would need to do is set a ValueConverter that arbitrarily mashes-up two or more other properties from your ItemsSource into the computed value you want to display in the unbound column.

Template Column Layout

You can create custom data templates to define a custom layout of the rows in the Silverlight data grid. For instance, instead of having the cells layout horizontally across a row, you can instead create a detailed view of your data for that row. In this template column layout of yours, you could arrange labels and cells in any position that you want.

xamWebComboEditor™ - NEW!

We are introducing a new, high performance Silverlight combo box editor in xamWebEditors™ that lets you bind to any flat list of items and have your users either enter values into the editable field, or select them from the dropdown list. When used in read-only fashion, it will restrict a user's selections to only those in the bound list of items, otherwise the user is not restricted to the choices in the list of items available. Like all of our controls, xamWebComboEditor is fully stylable and supports templating to customize the appearance of its editable field and dropdown toggle button.

Multi-Select

With xamWebComboEditor you can let users make multiple selections from the bound list of items as long as they hold down the CTRL key by setting the AllowMultipleSelection property to true. As an alternative means of selecting multiple items you can set the CheckBoxVisibility property to Visible and users can check-off multiple items or touch their checkboxes on a touch-enabled input device. Users can also enter multiple values into the combo's editable text field, separated by a customizable delimiter (set using the MultiSelectValueDelimiter property).

Filtering

Your users can type in text that is used to filter bound items within the dropdown list, reducing the number of possible selections at which they have to look. Furthermore, you can customize the filter through the control's CustomItemsFilter property. Several comparison operators that you may find useful have already been built-in:

• Starts with
• Ends with
• Contains
• Does not contain

Auto-Complete

When in Edit mode and your user starts typing, xamWebComboEditor begins filtering the bound items immediately and highlights suggested text that completes what the user has typed in. You can enable this behavior by setting AutoComplete to true.

Item Templates

You can apply a data template to every ComboEditorItem displayed by xamWebComboEditor for a consistent look and feel, or because you want to display multiple fields of data within each item (e.g., first and last name plus a photograph).

Persistence Framework – NEW!

Now you can persist control settings from any Silverlight dependency object--that includes third-party. custom, and Microsoft controls. Infragistics Persistence Framework helps you manage the saving and loading of these settings to any external store such as a file, database or isolated storage. Persistent settings let you offer your users the ability to save their personalized changes to the controls in your Silverlight line of business application when they are finished with one session, and then restore the controls to just the layout and appearance they had when they later return.

Infragistics.Compression – NEW!

Open, extract from, create and add to Zip files from within your Silverlight line of business applications with our new compiled assembly, Infragistics.Compression. It is an independent implementation of the DeflateStream class found in the .NET Framework, plus much more. Some of its many supported features include the following:

• Stream-oriented APIs
• Add/Extract/Remove Single or Multiple Files from Standard Zip Files
• Password Protect and Encrypt Zip Entries
• Obtain Directories of a Zip File’s Contents
• Configure Compression Levels to Trade-Off Speed vs. Ratio
• Supports Files/Comments using International Characters Sets
• ZIP64 Support for Zip Files larger than 2GB / more than 2¹⁶ Zip Entries
• 100% Managed Code Implementation of Zlib—you get Zlib compression, too!

Virtual Collection – NEW!

Manage very large numbers of objects in our new Virtual Collection component that will manage caching and asynchronous load on demand of these objects when necessary for significant performance gains. Using the Virtual Collection can:

• Reduce Waiting Time – Your user interface displays objects in the collection faster because only those objects need to have been loaded
• Reduces Memory Footprint – Your applications requires less memory because it doesn’t need to store every object in a virtually-sized collection

You can easily manage and update your data on demand with Virtual Collection. It features support for data paging, filtering, an adjustable cache size, CRUD operations and event notifications.

Virtual Collection works with any data consumer, even the standard Silverlight data grid control (System.Windows.Controls.DataGrid) from Microsoft. It implements the IList, ICollectionView, IPagedCollectionView, IFilteredCollectionView and IEditableCollectionView interfaces, and fires events for requests to any non-cached objects to let you execute custom logic when obtaining your data on demand.

UI Automation Support – NEW!

Our 2010 Volume 1 release adds support for Microsoft UI Automation (UIA) across all Silverlight line of business UI controls so that they can interact with assistive technology, improving the accessibility of individuals with disabilities.

Since UI Automation allows other applications, or even the operating system, to access, identify and manipulate each UIElement™ within your application, it can also be used to enable numerous automated testing scenarios.

Visual Studio 2010 Support

Since Visual Studio® 2010 brings such a rich user experience your way when you are building your Silverlight line of business applications, we wanted to make sure that our Silverlight controls supported its entire design-time experience, including:

• WYSIWYG drag and drop onto the design surface
• Full property browser support
• Enhanced debugging

Visual Studio 2010 delivers the Silverlight design time experience that Windows Forms and ASP.NET developers have been accustomed to in Visual Studio for years, so you can count on our Silverlight line of business toolset to fully support the Visual Studio 2010 experience. Explore Visual Studio 2010 and NetAdvantage Silverlight.