Windows Forms New Features - 2010 Volume 2

Driven by the features that customers have requested, and enhancements to your own productivity as a .NET developer as well as the productivity of your end users, the second 2010 volume release of our NetAdvantage® Windows Forms controls feature more stylability, flexibility and full compatibility with Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010.

 

WinFormManager™ - NEW Component!

By dropping our new form manager component onto your Form, you can style your Form's appearance through both property settings and NetAdvantage AppStylist® for Windows Forms. Even the many areas and aspects of your Form that would typically not avail themselves to styling become stylable. These "hard-to-style" areas include the caption, your Form's borders, and the buttons to Close, Restore, Maximize and Minimize your Form.

Create rounded Forms more easily now that you can apply to your Form all of the same border styles we already provide in WinToolbars™. Quickly apply colors to the various areas of the Form which were non-client areas that required cumbersome coding in the past. Toggle glass (IsGlassSupported property) and OS themes (UseOsThemes property) on an individual Form basis as needed, rather than having to change them for all Forms in your application. The benefits of our new form manager component just go on and on.

From ensuring a consistent application appearance (for example, to make sure all child forms displayed in an application with an Office® 2007 look and feel themselves appear like Office 2007 child dialogs), to controlling fine styling points that were difficult to impossible to control in the past (for example, styling or adding custom buttons to the caption), we think you will find something to cheer about in the new WinFormManager™.

Style your forms appearance via the property settings or usage of the NetAdvantage AppStylist for Windows Forms.

 

WinTimeSpanEditor™ - NEW Control!

We have added a new TimeSpan editor to our family of WinEditors™ based on the field editor Microsoft Project uses for the Duration of a task. This new TimeSpan editor can be used as an embeddable editor or placed anywhere in which you want end users to supply a TimeSpan value.


Remembers the Preferred Unit of Time

With the ability to parse string representations of TimeSpans, the TimeSpan editor can preserve the unit of time expression as input by the end user. For example, if the user types-in "1 day" then this becomes the unit of time (days) that will be persisted between their edit mode sessions, expediting their data entry user experience. This works automatically when the TimeSpan editor is embedded in the WinGrid™, otherwise you can implement the GetEditorContext and SetEditorContext methods to preserve the unit of time.


Spin Buttons

By default, the TimeSpan editor displays spin buttons which end users can click to increment or decrement the current TimeSpan value by one unit of time. Spin buttons can be hidden by setting the SpinButtonVisible property to false.


Formatted Time Span

In addition to editing TimeSpan values, you can use the TimeSpan editor to edit values of the Infragistics FormattedTimeSpan type. This simply extends TimeSpan with an additional piece of information, the Format which describes the unit of time (e.g., weeks, days, hours or minutes).


Localizable with TimeSpanFormatInfo

By implementing the GetExtendedInfo method, embeddable editor owners can provide enhanced formatting support by using the TimeSpanFormatInfo class to define localized strings for the units of time, for example, within a Spanish application you could use: "semana", "día", "hora" y "minuto".


Logical Weeks

Another use of GetExtendedInfo is to provide a means of defining the number of days which comprise a logical week. For example, business applications may define a week as 5 business days instead of 7 calendar days, and you can customize the TimeSpan editor to regard a week as a TimeSpan of 5 days for these kinds of scenarios.

 

WinGanttView™ - Enhanced!

We have added functionality that you have requested to the latest release of the WinGanttView™ that enables you to exclude non-workdays and non-working hours from the calculation of a task's duration.

Exclude non-working days from the time duration of your tasks with the enhanced Windows Forms WinGanttView control.


Task Working Hour Mode

A new property on the calendar info object called TaskWorkingHourMode has been added to account for non-workdays and non-working hours when calculating the duration of Tasks. For backwards compatibility, this property defaults to not skip over non-workdays and non-working hours. When set to 'AutoAdjust' your Task's properties will automatically be calculated to skip non-workdays and non-working hours (e.g., you could use this setting to skip weekends.)


CalendarDateSettings Collection

You can customize the workday status and working hours for a particular date using a new CalendarDateSettings collection that's now included on the calendar info object.

 

Dropdown Controls – Enhanced with Resizable Dropdowns

We have made the dropdown of the following 5 controls dynamically resizable with a drag handle in the lower right corner so that they can accommodate wider items in their dropdown lists:

  • Drop down editor button control
  • Popup control container
  • Combo box control
  • Drop down control
  • Combo box editor control

This new resizable drag handle is stylable through appearance properties, and also through the Application Styling Framework™.

Resize any dropdown box via the drag handle located at the bottom right of the grid with our enhanced resizable dropdown controls.

 

Restyled Run-Time Dialogs – NEW!

We have restyled several run-time dialogs within our Windows Forms controls for a better visual layout and more complete usability, including the following run-time dialogs:

  • Custom Row Filters Dialog in WinGrid
  • Select Summaries Dialog in WinGrid
  • Print Status Dialog in WinPrinting™
  • All Dialogs in WinToolbars™ including:
    • Customize Dialog
    • Customize Dialog for Add Command
    • Customize Dialog for the Keyboard
    • Customize Dialog for New Toolbar
    • Customize Dialog for Rearrange Command
    • Customize Dialog for Rename Toolbar
    • More Items Dialog
    • More Windows Dialog

Excel Templates – NEW!

This release adds support for the Excel 2007 Template file format (with file extension XLTX), Excel 2007 Macro-enabled template (with file extension XLTM), and Excel 97-2003 template (with file extension XLT). Three new WorkbookFormat enumeration values have been added so that you can specify that the workbook should be in this format when you create the Workbook object or change its format with the SetCurrentFormat method:

  • Excel2007Template
  • Excel2007MacroEnabledTemplate
  • Excel97To2003Template

Version-Free Assembly Names

Another feature that has been frequently requested is for us to provide builds of our NetAdvantage Windows Forms compiled assemblies which do not include the version number (or CLR identifier) on the assembly filename (e.g., Infragistics2.Shared.v10.2.dll becomes Infragistics.Shared.dll and so forth.)

In the case of a compiled assembly such as Infragistics.Excel which comes in CLR 2 and CLR 3 builds, the version-free assembly will be based on the more recent run-time (therefore, Infragistics.Excel.dll will be the same as Infragistics3.Excel.v10.2.dll without the version number or CLR identifier).

This makes it much easier for you to upgrade from one version to another without having to rebuild your application, such as by using assembly binding redirects in your application configuration file.

 

See What's New in Prior Releases

Every release of the NetAdvantage Windows Forms controls adds 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.