Windows Forms New Features - 2009 Volume 1

The first release of our NetAdvantage® Windows Forms controls and components in 2009 has been filled with productivity enhancements for the WinGrid™ control that enhance filtering and the ways in which your users work with the data grid control, a new and stylable WinPanel™ container that we are introducing for the first time, and several customer-requested features to the WinCombo™, WinListView™ and WinSchedule™ controls that we know many developers will love.

WinGrid - Enhanced!

We have made a number of enhancements aimed at increasing user productivity in this release to the comprehensive and well-rounded feature set of our Windows Forms data grid control—the WinGrid. When you are using the WinGrid, we want your users to feel as productive as they would be sitting in front of Microsoft® Excel™, because it really is that easy to call out the many exciting features users have at their disposal in a spreadsheet application like Excel inside the WinGrid with little or no code at all.

Enhanced Filtering User Interface

Now you can give end users a totally new user interface for filtering grid columns. Your users can check the checkboxes of column values to filter by, all listed in a dropdown window like in Microsoft Excel, and choose to filter from a variety of constraints appropriate to their column of data. For example, in a date column, you can filter values by the next week, month, or quarter; even filter to within a date range! It's all as simple as making a selection from a cascading menu for your users, resulting in tremendous productivity gains that you can attribute to your application.

Fixed Headers Right

You have always been able to pin column headers on the left-side of the data grid to freeze them in place, making it more convenient for your users to scroll data sets in the grid that have many columns. Now we have added the ability for your users to pin column headers on the right-side of the grid.

Right or left-side fixed headers, it makes no difference to the WinGrid. Your users can easily slide data sets horizontally while their key columns for reference remain fixed into place just like in Microsoft Excel.

Row Layout Grouping

Organize nested groupings of columns (for example, quarters grouped within a fiscal year) in Row Layout mode. You can now also move these groups of columns as a single unit, or confine column movement only to within its group. This allows your application to represent much more complex row layouts than previously possible, and you can nest groupings of columns as deeply as you need.

Checkbox Column Headers

Your users can toggle the checkbox on many rows all at once when you can add a checkbox to a column header that checks or un-checks many or all subordinate rows. The new checkbox column header automatically synchronizes with the cell values in that column if they are Boolean-type values, or if they can be edited with a checkbox editor. Synchronization can also be limited to the scope of a row island.

Sibling Band Order

Now you can set or change the visible index of bands at the same level of the data grid control, so that they appear in the sequence your users want.

WinPanel - NEW!

This new and fully-stylable container combines the features found inside of the standard Windows Forms panel (like scrolling and auto-sizing) with the full stylability of the Infragistics Application Styling Framework™ so that you can now have complete control over its appearance and apply role-based styles to it like you can with our other controls.

WinCombo and WinComboEditor™ - Enhanced!

We have added dropdown list multi-selection checkbox capability to the combo box and combo box editor controls. This improved means of performing a multi-selection in the dropdowns of the WinCombo and WinComboEditor allow users to choose multiple dropdown options with their mouse only. This is ideally suited for user interface scenarios that must work with one hand, since there is no need for a keyboard or to use two hands to perform a Ctrl-click.

WinListView - Enhanced!

We have added "Lasso" range selection to the list view control so that it can more closely give your users the selection behavior they may be familiar with from using the Windows® Explorer to browse their file system. Users can easily drag-select a range of items in the list view just like they do with files or folders in the Windows Explorer. Any list items touching the rectangular region (the "lasso") dragged out by the user's mouse will become part of the selected range.

WinSchedule - Enhanced!

We have added two great new features to the WinSchedule in this release that give you greater control over how your users modify appointment times with their mouse in the WinDayView™ and how you can customize working hours.

Appointment Dragging and Resizing

In WinDayView when the user grabs a hold of the edge of an appointment with the mouse, they can drag the edge of the appointment to alter the times and duration of the appointment. They can also drag the appointment to a new position on the WinDayView schedule, for example if one time of day becomes particularly congested they can easily drag-and-drop appointments to a time of the day when they have more free time.

In this release we have introduced new events that fire when an appointment object is being resized or dragged (and dropped) in the user interface. These fire before and after the action which allows you to cancel the behavior from occuring based on your own arbitrary logic. Now you can control how and when you want these operations on the appointment object to occur, for example, so that you can prevent dragging an appointment into certain hours of the day.

Custom Working Hours

Business happens at all hours, and these are not always going to be contiguous stretches of the day, so we have enhanced the WinDayView so that it now enables you to configure your working hour periods so that they can be non-contiguous (i.e., lunch breaks), or so that they are rules-based (i.e., apply one set of working hours for the first weekday of the month). You can pass this superior customizability on to meet the needs of your end users, and you can also finely-tune the appearance of arbitrary time slots on the WinDayView schedule.