2008 is over and I wanted to create a summary of major things that happened. Its been extremely successful year for DevComponents. We’ve been leading the way with the new controls and huge number of improvements and you responded by using our products and spreading the word. We are very thankful for that. Thank you.

Most of these features and improvements were done as direct response to your requests on our very active forums and through email. Please keep them coming. You are in charge.

Here are some highlights from 2008:

DotNetBar for Windows Forms

• To start the year back in January 2008 we added Horizontal and Vertical scrollbar controls with Office 2007 style. We also included bunch of improvements and minor tweaks to our controls.
• Advanced Masked Text Box Controls with Office 2007 styling, drop-down support and custom buttons added
• We added huge and very popular AdvTree control. This is very powerful TreeView control
• We improved our Balloon control with the Office 2007 Alert style
• ButtonX control received BlueOrb style and custom shapes support
• MessageBoxEx got improved with custom localization support
• ItemPanel got support for creating items based on template set through ItemTemplate property
• Lot of controls received support for our highly praised text-markup
• SuperTooltip control received multi-line support for header and footer
• MonthCalendar control received automatic sizing support
• DateTimeInput control got number of tweaks for easier input and navigation between input fields
• We added all new CrumbBar control in Vista and Office 2007 style. This is horizontal tree control seen in Vista File Explorer
• AdvTree control our very sought after tree control got huge number of improvements including data-binding support with automatic grouping, sorting, multi-selection and more…
  
• We added unique designed by us Vista Glass inspired color scheme for Ribbon and other controls
• Progress Bar control got support for vertical styling
• ComboTree a combo-box control with popup tree control added including data-binding support
• Rating Star control added to enable easy content rating
• MaskedTextBoxAdv control added with custom button and drop-down support
• TextBoxDropDown control added a text-box with built-in popup support
• There are hundreds of minor tweaks added throughout the suite…

DotNetBar for WPF

• To start the 2008 we added industry leading VS.NET 2008 design-time support to our controls
• TabNavigation control added, an different way to present the “flow” of information or replace standard tab with different look and feel tab
• Docking controls received ton of improvements with better support for Windows Forms content, tooltip for tabs and much more
• We added MonthCalendar control added with multi-month display support, multi-selection support, Office 2007 style and custom styling ability
• New DateTimeInput control added with NULL Value support, Office 2007 style support and custom date/time formats
• New DoubleInput control an numeric input control with NULL value support and Office 2007 Style
• IntegerInput control added, an numeric input control with NULL value support and Office 2007 Style
• StateAnimationControl added for easy animation of state transitions in any WPF native control
• New UpDownButton Control Added
• Ribbon Control received number of imrovements and fixes and is rock-solid
• EditorsSettings.CurrentCulture static property added to specify different culture for use in input controls from the system one
• CrumbBar Vista Style Bread-crumb tree control added to suite with Vista and Office 2007 styles
• Watermark support for input controls added
• Just to end the year we released beta of DotNetBar for WPF 5.0 with huge new control added. Check it out.

We are working on some very cool stuff for 2009 and can’t wait to get into your hands. Make sure you check out the DotNetBar for WPF 5.0 Beta that is available on Customer Only web site.  That is something to start the 2009 with

Thanks once more for using our products, posting and helping us on the forums, requesting new features and spreading the word about our controls. Thank you for being our customer. You make all this possible. We just execute your wishes

Wishing everyone health, piece and success in 2009.

We just posted latest version of DotNetBar for Windows Forms with 44th control added! New control is 5-Star Rating control that is available as light-weight item for use on menus, toolbars, ribbon and other containers, as well as RatingStar stand-alone control. Here is screen-shot of new control:

Features:

• Displays average rating or user set rating
• Support for custom star images
• Data-binding support
• Label with text-markup support
• Enable/Disable editing through IsEditable property.

If you already have DotNetBar license you can download latest build at any time on our Customer Only web-site. If not you should really get one

Trial version can be found on DotNetBar web site.

We just posted a minor release with couple of fixes and new features. You can download it on our Customer Only web site. Trial version available as well. Release notes here.

1. Make sure you try latest version of the software before you contact support and make sure you include version of the software you are running with your support request. Most reputable companies will fix problems and include those fixes in latest versions so your problem might already be resolved.

2. Make sure you have included sample project or clear step-by-step instructions on how to reproduce the problem using the sample applications you provide or is provided by vendor.

I can’t stress this point enough. When you try to write and explain the problem there is a lot left for interpretation and explanations are usually not clear enough. Time ends up wasted by back and forth in trying to nail exactly what problem is.

If you provide sample project or step-by-step instructions on how to reproduce the problem there is no ambiguity. If you have project and you run it and there is a crash it is perfect. If you can follow your step-by-step instructions to crash an app it is excellent information as well. Always include exact exception and stack trace if available as well.

If you do these two things I can guarantee you that you will get most out of any support request you send anywhere.

I cought my self number of times writing emails requesting support which when I re-read before sending, I saw are not adhering to what I just wrote.

So often we get frustrated by the problem we are trying to solve that we forget to clearly communicate what the problem actually is…

There are plenty of companies out there that are just in business of pushing their crap on you, but when you need help they are either nowhere to be found or they just give you such run-around that you give up frustrated.

I had recently two experiences of that kind on both ends of spectrum. My Sony’s Laptop hard-disk failed while it was still under warranty but failure was not complete drive failure where it does not boot, rather it fails to read/write certain sectors…

I called Sony support and they did not want to take laptop in for repair because over the phone they could not reproduce the problem. After spending couple of hours with them on phone I just gave up and ordered new hard-disk on my dime and installed it. However, I decided to stay away from Sony laptops in future and in mean-time have sold this one…

On opposite end of spectrum was my experience with Apple. My MacBook which replaced Sony had intermittent charging problems. Magsafe connector did not connect properly. I made appointment for Genius bar in Apple store, arrived there, they looked into the problem, saw it happening and gave me new machine on the spot. Whole event took 20 minutes total. Amazing service and one of the reasons Apple is getting lot of people to buy their products these days…

Here at DevComponents we try to do same for you when you contact us for support. If you report bug we’ll work with you to reproduce it and once that is done it is 99% guaranteed that it will be fixed in next build. We drop everything and work on getting that resolved first. Why only 99%? Sometimes it is .NET Framework issue or something that is outside of our control, but this is very rare.

So if you are selling something stand behind it or don’t sell it all…

One of the new features we added to AdvTree control in 7.6 release is search. While control has input focus you can start typing and we’ll search and select the node that begins with the text you typed. You can type whole words and if there is a node that begins with that text it will be selected.

The input buffer for search of course expires after pre-defined period of inactivity. Here are properties that you might find helpful if you are trying to control this feature:

• KeyboardSearchEnabled - Turns on/off the keyboard search
• SearchBufferExpireTimeout - The timeout for the buffer expiration if there is no keyboard activity. Default value is 1000 milliseconds. If you set it to 0 the buffer will be disabled and control will essentially search for first for first node that starts with the letter you typed on keyboard.
• FindNodeByText - method that you can use to search for node that starts with given text from code

New release of DotNetBar for Windows Forms 7.6 is now available with over 60 new features and enhancements including 2 completely new controls. DotNetBar now gives you 43 controls to create professional applications with ease.

New controls added:

1. ComboTree control which is ComboBox with drop-down tree control. This is extremely versatile control that you can use to replace any DropDownList style ComboBox when you need multiple-columns on popup or to represent hierarchical data.
   
2. TextBoxDropDown control which is single line text box control with drop-down support and Office 2007 style. You can drop-down any Windows Forms control using the drop-down button built into the control as well as add any of our standard items, like buttons, check-boxes, etc. to the popup.
   

We also added a ton of new features to our very popular Advanced Tree control. We focused on adding great support for data-binding and I am very happy with outcome. You can now bind Advanced Tree control to all standard binding sources by setting DataSource property. Control will nicely display the non-hierarchical data, but where it really shines is in automatic grouping support that it provides.

You simply set the GroupingMemebers property to comma separated list of field names you want control to group data by, and all work is done automatically. Very useful, very nice and no code needed. We even automatically create human readable column headers based on your field names… Here is screenshot from our updated TreeControl sample that demonstrates this:

This release is available now. If you have DotNetBar license you can download latest build at any time on our Customer Only web-site.

Trial version can be found on DotNetBar web site.

DotNetBar for Windows Forms 7.5 has been released with over 40 new features and enhancements. Highlight of this release is all new Vista Glass inspired theme added for all controls including the Ribbon. This theme is original and designed entirely by us. We have went through lot of proof of concept styles until we arrived to what we think is great looking theme.

We were tempted to style this theme in “black glass” but after creating few concepts we saw that theme like that is really “over-powering” and it makes the Ribbon and other user interface elements the central point of an application and it does not let your content, your application stand out. Instead we designed theme that blends into Windows Vista, but it does not take over visually the application and your content can get attention and focus as it should. We hope you love it as much as we do.

Here is a screen-shot from RibbonPad control sample which shows off new theme:

There is also a nice style for toolbars that is similar to the Windows Media Player toolbar that you can use. Here is screenshot of that:

To make toolbar like this add Bar control to the form, set BarType=StatusBar (this simply chooses the predefined color table for bar background), then add buttons and set on each button ColorTable=Blue. In screenshot above I also set FixedSize=80,32 for each button.

This release also includes new features for our very popular Advanced Tree control that developers like you tell me they are upgrading to just for speed improvements alone. This time we have added support for displaying images in column header, methods for sorting by column, improved multi-node selection, selection per-cell, ability to replace check-box states with images you specify and more.

There is much more coming so stay tuned

We just added two new applications to our DotNetBar Application Gallery. Application Gallery showcases just a few among thousands of applications that are using DotNetBar.

This time we’ve added the Batch Image Processor an great image manipulation tool made by BinaryMark:

Batch Image Processor

Second addition is gDays Assistant by LOGIKonline which is an great looking windows interface to Google’s mail, calendar, contacts and document online solutions.

gDays Assistant

Check out more apps that are using DotNetBar in Application Gallery.