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. With this release, you will see our continued commitment and investment 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:

Overall, we had an emphasis on quality for 15.2, which means improving existing features, RTM'ing features that were previously CTP, and polishing your developer experience using the product.

I'll highlight each area of focus for 15.2.

ToolbarsManager Improvements

Notification Badges

This is a cool new feature that is common in mobile apps for notifications ... now you can do the same in your Windows Forms apps. The goals are:

• To be notified via noticeable means for time-sensitive matters that require my attention
• To clearly see how many new items need my attention
• That when I click on the tool item with the notification, I expect to be shown/taken to the items that require my attention and (if applicable) to be able to interact with those items/events.
• That once I’ve checked the items/events I was notified for, there will no longer be a notification calling for my attention (until the next event that I should pay attention to)

DataChart Improvements

We've added a few enhancements to the Charts:

• SaveTo (ImageType) – BMP, EMF, EXIF, GIF, GUID, ICON, JPEG, MemoryBmp, PNG, TIFF, WMF
• Gallery Stacked Series
• Legend Types
• Value Overlay

Axis Intervals - Major/Minor Gridlines

• • Annotation Layers
    • Category Tooltip Layer

• • • Item Tooltip Layer
    
    • Crosshair Layer
    
    • Category Highlight Layer
    
    • Category Item Highlight Layer

• Bubble Series

• • Stacked Series
  • Polar Series

• • Radial Series

• Gesture / Touch Support
  • Pinch and Zoom, Pan, Press & Hold
• Scale Legend
  • Support for the BubbleSeries to visualize the correspondence between bubble size and color

CTP Controls - Excel Spreadsheet

The goal of every app seems to be delivering more Excel-like features to your customers. We included a Spreadsheet control in WPF last year, and this year we've focused on doing the same in Windows Forms. This release is labeled a CTP, but it has a ton of great features and samples. Take a spin with this exciting new control and let us know what you think!

• Cell Formatting
  • Number formats
  • Horizontal Alignments – General, Left, Center, Right, Fill, Justify, Center Across Selection, Distributed
  • Vertical Alignments – Top, Center, Bottom, Justified, Distributed
  • Wrap Text
  • Shrink To Fit
  • Indent
  • Fonts – All font settings except double underline and accounting*
  • All Border styles
  • All Fills styles
  • Mixed Format/Formatted Text
• Merged Cells
• Undo/Redo
• Resizing/Hiding Rows/Columns
• Insert/Delete Rows/Columns/Cells
• Split & Frozen Panes
• Formula Bar w/ Name box
• Cut/Copy/Paste
• Edit support
  • Update active cell or entire selection
  • Enter formulas (including array formulas)
  • Infers number format based on entry
  • Fixed decimal support
• Excel style keyboard navigation
  • Arrow keys
  • Enter key
  • End mode
  • Selection modes – normal, extended, add to selection
  • Scroll lock support
• Zoom support
• Worksheet tabs with multiple tab selection
• Hyperlinks
• Data Validations
• Worksheet image background
• Context Menus

Since the new Spreadsheet control includes the FormattedTextEditor, it gets the new SubScript and SuperScript capabilities that were needed for the Spreadsheet control.

Styling Improvements

To give a modern Office look, we've included new Style Libraries for all Windows Forms controls.

Outlook Blue

• Outlook2013 - Dark Gray.isl
• Outlook2013 - LightGray.isl
• Outlook2013 - White.isl

Excel Green

• Excel2013 - White.isl
• Excel2013 - Dark Gray.isl
• Excel2013 - Light Gray.isl

Ease of Use for Office Inspired Apps

We've added a few smaller features to further enhance your Office-inspired apps:

• FormattedTextEditor - Superscript and Subscript support - The FormattedTextEditor will be used as part of the new UltraSpreadsheet control so it will need to support certain features that the xamSpreadsheet and Excel support. This will included Subscript and Superscript.

• PivotGrid - Simplified Binding - The FlatDataSource class provides a way for the developer to show “non-OLAP” data in the PivotGrid control, we anticipate this to be the primary means by which the developer will display data in the PivotGrid control. The objective for this feature is to make it easier to connect the PivotGrid control to a database table

• WinGrid - Summary Rows Height - the summary rows may now have either smaller or larger height than the one need to fit their content, which was previously always used.

• MessageBoxManager - Window Location

Wrapping it Up ....

That’s it for this Windows Forms 15.2 release. As you can see, we are still making big investments in Windows Forms - this platform is still driving the Enterprise mission critical apps today and our goals are to deliver the support you need in updating and maintaining these applications as you look at newer, modern platforms for future enterprise development. If you have any questions, shoot me an email at jasonb@infragistics.com, and if you have any ideas for the product or don’t see a feature that you’d like, let us know at the Product Ideas page!