What's New in Windows Forms 15.1

Jason Beres [Infragistics] / Monday, April 13, 2015

With more than 100+ controls, Infragistics Windows Forms is the most mature, fully-featured Windows Forms Product on the market. With features that cover every aspect of enterprise software development including Microsoft Office Style user interfaces, high performance charting, and full modern experiences with touch & gestures. This release might seem lighter than 14.2, we shipped a lot of goodness in 14.2 with the new Charting controls, Carousel, Pivot Grid Flat Datasource, and more. We are continuing to invest in Windows Forms, we recognize that it is by far the most widely used .NET platform for enterprise scale apps that target the desktop. Our goals and themes remain the same for the Ultimate toolset, and Windows Forms is a major part of this story:

  • Touch Everywhere, Office Inspired Apps on Every Platform
  • Deliver Outstanding Experiences with Awesome Branding and Styling
  • Developer Productivity Across Every Device, Every Platform

The core of our Window Forms platform is already very strong, we continue to enhance existing controls and add new controls to the toolset.

Features in this Release

Ease of Use

New Options for Close Button on Tabs in Dock Manager

  • We have now added the ability to show the close button on each tab of the Tabbed DockArea so that users can easily close any tab.

New “Select Printer” Option for Print Preview

  • Now developers can opt into showing a printer selection button in our PrintPreview dialogs so that users can switch printers before printing. 

 

 

Select Multiple Columns at Once in the Gris Column Chooser

  • In the past users could only select a single column at a time – making it time consuming and more troublesome to pick multiple columns
  • Now, we have made it much easier by enabling users to quickly select multiple columns

 

Bullets and Numeric Lists Support in our Word Engine

  • Along with supporting Bullet Lists and Automatic Numbering you can also control the indentation of items so the user can display their lists hierarchically
  • Symbols used to depict the bullets are actually standard textual characters, but typically used in conjunction with symbolic fonts such as windings
  • Automatic numbering runs can be depicted in various different ways:
    • Numbers in cardinal or ordinal forms
    • Verbose representation of numbers (“One, “Two”, ‘Three”…)
    • Roman Numerals
    • Uppercase, Lowercase
    • Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Hebrew, etc. 

 

Right to Left Support in Explorer Bar

  • This has been an ongoing effort for the past few cycles
  • In 14.1 it was added to the all editors
  • In the last 14.2 release RightToLeft support was added to UltraGrid, UltraTree, UltraCombo and UltraDropDown
  • Now, in this release we are adding it to the ExplorerBar.

 

 

Styling

New ISLs from our Application Samples and Visual Studio 2013

  • In this release we are adding several new ISLs to our extensive set:
    • Outlook CRM Application Samples
    • Inventory Management Application Sample
    • Project Manager Application Samples
    • Visual Studio 2013 Blue

    • Visual Studio 2013 Dark

    • Visual Studio 2013 Light

 

Animated GIF Support

Currently out Presentation Layer supports most .NET supported image formats. However, our framework does not provide support images containing time-based frames, such as animated GIF images. They would only display their first frame of animation and no more. In 15.1 we added animation support to our base framework so that images containing time-base frames will have all frames rendered. Developers only need to supply an animated image to the appropriate Image property on most Infragistics Windows Forms controls, and voila, end users will see animated images.

 

Wrapping it Up ...

I hope you are as excited to get your hands on this as we were in building it ... we focused on stability in 15.1, added a few new features, and are looking forward to a pretty big and exciting 15.2 later this year. I want to assure you that Windows Forms continues to be a big investment area for us. To get started with all this goodness, download Infragistics Ultimate 15.1. today from here:

https://www.infragistics.com/products/ultimate

To see all of the new Windows Forms features, go here:

https://www.infragistics.com/products/windows-forms/

If you have any feedback, please shoot me an email to jasonb@infragistics.com, and as always please use our User Voice site to include product feature suggestions for future releases.