Windows Forms New Features - 2009 Volume 2

With this second volume release of 2009, we broaden your Windows Forms toolset with new additions to WinSchedule™, WinEditors™ and a tile panel that’s ideal for creating glanceable user interfaces with the ability for users to drill down into data. We also deepen support for customizing the appearance of your WinGrid™ (on-screen and when exported to PDF/XPS). With this breadth and depth of rich features, you can create highly-functional, relevant line of business applications with the "Wow-factor!" to produce a positive user experience.

 

WinTimelineView™ - NEW!

WinTimelineView is a brand new scheduling UI control that we've added to the WinSchedule family of controls.  At first glance, the timeline looks like a WinDayView™ re-oriented by 90 degrees so that it lists owners vertically down the side, and its shows timeslots horizontally across the top.  Of course, it shares all of the behaviors of the WinSchedule architecture with which you’ve become accustomed, including drag-and-drop of appointments, resizing of appointments, multiple owners and recurring activities.

The day view vs. timeline view provides vertical and horizontal views of your appointments.


What is special about timelines is that you can now span different timescales – from time periods of less than an hour, up to days, weeks, months or longer! Whether your timeline represents a conventional schedule (e.g., visits to a doctor's office), or different stages of manufacturing for a product, or even month- and year-long projects that your users must manage – you have that flexibility all within one scheduling UI control with WinTimelineView.

Span different timescales for your scheduling needs with the all new flexible WinTimelineView control.


Using the flexible DateTimeInterval properties of WinTimelineView, like its PrimaryInterval property, you can make its timeslots take on whatever unit of time your application requires.  This new type also has accompanying design-time support, so you can easily set DateTimeInterval values in Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005/2008.

 

WinControlContainerEditor™ - NEW!

Give your users a custom editing experience with WinControlContainerEditor, a new component that implements the IProvideEmbeddableEditor interface (so you don't have to!)  By implementing IProvideEmbeddableEditor, you have been able to embed many kinds of editors into our Windows Forms controls that support embeddable editors.  Now we make it even easier for you to plug-in your own custom editor controls without having to implement this interface.

Embed custom editors and visualization controls within a grid cell for ease of updating and displaying information using our WinControlContainerEditor.


What is even better than the time-savings of simplifying use of your own custom editor control is that you can now display data values with custom visual rendering.  For example, you can use the WinChart™ to display the value in an editable cell to users without having to implement any UI draw filters.  When the user is editing this cell, WinControlContainerEditor uses its ControlContainerEditor (this holds your custom editor control) to give the user editing functionality.  When the user is done editing the cell, WinControlContainerEditor switches to a custom rendering control you provide (in this case, WinChart) separate from the editor, whose only job is making that value look great!

Ease-of-use and separation of responsibilities between editing and rendering not only improves your productivity as a developer, but also enables great user experiences when editing data.

 

WinTilePanel™ - NEW!

This new panel is a ready-made container for presenting your users with the popular Focus Tile UX pattern.  It allows users to quickly browse through a set of content panes in summary form.  From any given content pane, users can drill down into an expanded view for additional detail.  Content panes can be reordered by drag-and-drop with the mouse, and the content panes rearrange themselves with impressive animated transition effects.

The Windows Forms tile view allows users to browse content panes and drilldown into each for additional details.


You can customize what each content pane displays, including other UI controls. The content pane permits you to have arbitrary content and header, an optional drop shadow, and it can exist in different content pane states such as large and normal.

Fill your WinTilePanel with content panes at either design-time or run-time, using a programmatic API for adding and removing content panes dynamically.  Once your users have arranged the layout of their tiles in a way in which they like to work, you can even save/load the tile layout to restore it for them later.

 

WinGrid - Enhanced with Many New Features!

We have added many new features to the WinGrid that allow you to customize facets of its appearance in new ways.

Column Moving Indicators

Customize what image is used to prompt users where the column they drag will be re-positioned to when they drop it.  The default red arrow images have been updated to a more modern look-and-feel, too.  These new Image properties for the column moving indicators can be found on DragDropIndicatorSettings.

Column moving indicators indicate where a column will be repositioned when a user drags and drops it.


Selected Cells Maintain ForeColor/BackColor

Now you can override any System-defined or Row-defined Selected or Active appearances at the cell-level, with the addition of new Selected- and ActiveAppearance properties, respectively. A pair of Selected- and ActiveAppearanceEnabled properties have been added to layout so you can toggle this capability on/off.

Furthermore, since you told us the most common properties you'd want to override are the foreground and background colors of selected cells, you can now set defaults for these selected colors in one place through the DefaultSelectedForeColor and DefaultSelectedBackColor, respectively.  This will make it a lot easier for you when you don't want these colors superseded by the system default, and you didn't want to make changes to the SelectedRowAppearance or SelectedAppearance.

 

Selection Overlay

Have you ever noticed when you click and drag across multiple cells in Microsoft Excel, your rectangular selection overlay of the selected cells blends the color of the selection overlay with the underlying cells? Now you can offer users of your WinGrid-powered applications the same familiar look and feel with two new properties named SelectionOverlayColor and SelectionOverlayBorderColor.

Selection Overlay in our Windows Forms data grid control, WinGrid.

 

Active Cell Border Thickness

You can change the active cell border thickness (this border will always be drawn with a solid line style), and have it applied on all 4 sides of the active cell to make it appear more prominent.

Active cell properties allow you to indicate what color scheme and border thickness will be visible when a cell is active.


Row Selector State-Specific Images

A new RowSelectorImages property has been added to the layout on which you can customize the Image used for:

  • Active row
  • Row with pending changes (pencil)
  • Active row with pending changes
  • Add new row
  • Active add new row

You can also clear the state-specific image for any of these row selector states by setting its Image property on RowSelectorImages to null (Nothing in VB.NET) at run-time, if you do not want any Image displayed for that particular state.

Indicate the state of your rows with small images by utlizing the row selector property.


Group-by Row Connector Appearance

Style the row connector element independently of the GroupByRowAppearance, and even define distinct connector appearances on a per-column basis.

Group grid data with specific, distinct color coded identifiers at each level.

 

WinGridDocumentExporter™ - Enhanced!

When you export the WinGrid to PDF/XPS file format using the WinGridDocumentExporter component, the exported representation of the data grid will position summaries on its group-by rows to match their on-screen appearance in the WinGrid based on the prevailing GroupBySummaryDisplayStyle setting.  This gives you higher fidelity data grid representations in your PDF and XPS documents.

 

See What's New in Prior Releases

Every release of the NetAdvantage Windows Forms controls add value and features onto the release that came before. You can read more about what was new in previous volume releases here or at anytime by consulting the "What's New" pages in the accompanying documentation.


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