Windows Forms New Features - 2010 Volume 1

Get the newest visualization metaphors like Gantt charts and Windows® 7 scenic ribbons, support for the .NET 4 Client Profile build profile for Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010, continued performance enhancements and much more in 2010 Volume 1.

 

WinGanttView™ - NEW!

We've added a brand new scheduling UI control in WinGanttView so you can give your users a Microsoft® Project-style user experience within your own application. Its user interface is composed of a task grid and timeline, divided by a splitter that allows users to resize.


Timeline

We've leveraged WinTimelineView™ to provide a timescale-agnostic timeline upon which inter-dependent and summary task bars, sub-tasks, milestones, deadlines and more can be plotted and manipulated by drag-and-drop.

The Windows Forms gantt view timeline can be used to chart dependent tasks and deadlines for a project.


Task Grid

Interactive analysis such as sorting tasks by multiple fields (including start time, finish time, resource, percent complete and more) is best delivered in a tree-structured, task grid which leverages our WinGrid™ control.

The Windows Forms gantt view task grid allows users to sort tasks for easy viewing.


Calendar Look and Calendar Info

If you have used WinSchedule™ before, then you'll like the familiar user experience of the CalendarLook and CalendarInfo components exposed by the Gantt chart. While it may have the power of a standalone project schedule management tool built-in, it really is just another control derived from our WinSchedule family of controls and you'll find many programming concepts such as data binding and styling work like they do in other WinSchedule views.

We summarize a few of the major features in WinGanttView:

Manage Tasks

Tasks are a central concept to your project's work breakdown structure. WinGanttView lets your users add, update, and delete tasks through means such as the new/edit task information dialog and interactively, such as by dragging tasks from one edge to adjust their start or finish times. You can also set tasks to an inactive or disabled status, or designate them to be a milestone.

Track Task Completion

Tasks have a percent complete property that can be visualized and manipulated (by dragging the percent complete indicator bar) on the timeline in addition to through the new/edit task information dialog. You can assign your tasks a deadline, that is a point in time marked by a special symbol on the timeline by which the task should be completed.

The Windows Forms gantt view control provides users a task completion indicator bar that can be updated by dragging the bar to the specific percent completed.


Multiple Timescales

Because of the versatility of the timeline view, you can display Gantt charts whose time intervals are measured in nearly any TimeSpan from minutes to months and more. Timeslots are dynamically resizable. You can stack headers above other headers to create groupings (like "Q1" above "January", "February", and "March").

Summary Task Bars

When you give a task one or more child sub-tasks, it is referred to as a summary task. WinGanttView depicts summary tasks differently within the user interface, so that it is clear the length of the summary task subsumes the lengths of all of its sub-tasks. If a change to a sub-task impacts the start or end time of its summary task, then the summary task automatically updates itself.

Constraints

WinGanttView™ supports placing constraints (rules) on tasks similar to Microsoft Project, such as dependencies or as soon/as late as possible. If a constraint is violated by the user, an event fires that will give you an opportunity to customize the message seen by the user to fit with your own application.

Tooltips

When your user mouses over a task, you can display a tooltip with custom-formatted information. This information does not have to be limited to the task, but can show other rich, valuable information from your application.

 

Windows 7 Scenic Ribbon - NEW!

With the Windows 7 operating system, Microsoft introduced a new ribbon style in the scenic ribbon that with NetAdvantage Windows Forms 2010 Volume 1 you can now add to your own Windows Forms applications even if running outside of Windows 7. By using our WinToolbarsManager™ component, you can apply this new look and feel by setting its Style property to ScenicRibbon.

Add your own Windows Forms applications to the scenic ribbon using the WinToolbarsManager component.


Application Menu

In a scenic ribbon, the application menu button appears as a tab in the ribbon's tab area. It has left and right tool areas by default—there are no tools placed in the footer tool area as in an Office® 2007-style ribbon user interface. Another difference is that double-clicking the application menu button does not close the application in a scenic ribbon.


Additional Ribbon Amenities

With the Windows 7 scenic ribbon you also receive the many tool types and all familiar ribbon amenities you have in an Office 2007 ribbon, including:

  • Tabs and Groups – Tabs categorize a ribbon of related features, while groups let you organize related functions together within expandable layout panels of the ribbon window.
  • Galleries – Help your users choose from related options by presenting them with pictoral thumbnails within a scrollable gallery.
  • Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) – With a quick access toolbar that users can add and remove tools from, you can have the most commonly used tools always at your users' fingertips.
  • Contextual Tabs – Contextual tabs can display a caption above other tabs and groups to highlight functions particular to a context-specific task.

WinSplitter - NEW!

You can use the new WinSplitter control to resize docked controls at run-time so that your users can easily resize, restore and collapse the areas in the user interface. It's best suited for forms with controls that are going to have varying amounts of data to present, such that your user needs the flexibility to expand the area allotted to one control while reducing or collapsing that taken by another.

One cool feature of this control is the ability to collapse and restore with the touch of a button, positioned amid the splitter bar. Additionally, as with any other Infragistics Windows Forms control you can completely customize the splitter's appearance using its Appearance objects or through the Application Styling Framework™.

Use the Windows Forms splitter control to divide your user interface into easily resizable, restorable, and collapsible areas.


WinMessageBoxManager™ - NEW!

With the new WinMessageBoxManager component you can display application-specific and informational content using a modal dialog box with full styling and customization options.

Because we have exposed most of the static Show method overloads found on System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox for greatest compatibility, you can simply drop-in WinMessageBoxManager as an instant replacement for MessageBox in your NetAdvantage for Windows Forms-powered applications. Unlike MessageBox, all content within the WinMessageBoxManager dialog window can be formatted with the rich text formatting capabilities you are accustomed to from our WinFormattedTextEditor™ such as mixing text of different fonts, colors and styles, as well as hyperlinks in the flow of text. It can also be completely styled to fit your global application style using Appearance objects or the Application Styling Framework.

Use the Windows Forms message box manager to inform users of application-specific information.

 

WinActivityIndicator™ - NEW!

Our new WinActivityIndicator control as part of WinExtras™ gives you a means of informing users about time-consuming background processes. Running lengthy operations like downloads and distributed database transactions can make it seem like your user interface is unresponsive. An activity indicator presents a compelling, animated user experience that indicates your processing in happening behind-the-scenes.

Use the WinActivityIndicator control to inform users of an activities progress that is happening behind-the-scenes (e.g., file transfer).


Marquee Animation

WinActivityIndicator offers the Marquee style of animation to indicate a process is ongoing through its MarqueeAnimationStyle property. This animation can either continuously run from one side to the other in the same direction (the default), or you can have it bounce back and forth from side-to-side. Both the width of the animated marker, the speed of the animation, and the marquee's fill appearance can be directly customized through additional properties.


OS Theme Aware

WinActivityIndicator does let you style its appearance and animated marquee using different colors and gradients through Appearance objects or the Application Styling Framework. However, we know that many of you want adherence to theming when the operating system has theming enabled. Our ViewStyle property can be set to either an Aero or Standard view style for control over just these scenarios, and you can set the UseOsThemes property if you want to support Microsoft OS themes such as Windows Classic, Windows XP or Aero.

 

WinCombo™ and WinComboEditor™ - Enhanced

By default, when the AutoCompleteMode property that enabled users to have possible values suggested to them was set to Suggest or SuggestAppend, only the items starting with the characters the user had typed in the text field would be listed. The AutoSuggestFilterMode property now provides you with the option to choose between StartsWith or Contains conditions.

Enable users to have possible values suggested to them as they type information into a text field.


Using Contains as your suggest filter mode makes your application more efficient when choosing from certain kinds of list data, such as when the list contains highly formatted or structured names. For example, a procurement manager for a tire manufacturer searching a list of IUPAC chemical compounds from one of her suppliers might type-in "thiol" to immediately whittle down the list of suggestions to only those compounds containing this particular sulfur functional group (which by IUPAC nomenclature can appear almost anywhere within the name).

 

WinFormattedTextEditor™ - Enhanced

We have included numerous performance enhancements to the rich formatted text editor for Windows Forms that makes it perform about 1200% faster under the most-often used feature settings.

 

.NET 4 Client Profile Support

Now you can build your NetAdvantage® Windows Forms-powered applications using the recommended .NET 4 Client Profile build target in Microsoft Visual Studio® 2010. We've designed and written all controls so that they only require this smaller working set of .NET 4 assemblies, dramatically improving the size, portability and performance of the Windows Forms applications you’ll be able to build and deploy. Explore Visual Studio 2010 and NetAdvantage Windows Forms.