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.

Hi everyone, we just released DotNetBar for Windows Forms 7.4 with over 50 new feature and enhancements.

Highlight of this release is all new CrumbBar control a bread-crumb style horizontal tree control.

Here is a screen-shot from CrumbBar control sample that is included with the 7.4 build:

Here you can find short tutorial on how to get started with this new control. Its really simple.

There are also many improvements to new Advanced Tree control we released last time.

Fully function trial version is, as usual, available on DotNetBar for Windows Forms site.

We have some very nice additions coming in future, so stay tuned

Hi everyone,

We just released new version of our very popular DotNetBar for WPF with all new CrumbBar control. Now, don’t think we started shipping cookies This is Vista style compact tree control. Here is screen-shot which should give you better idea:

Included are Vista style, Office 2007 Blue, Black and Silver as well as custom color scheme generation based on single color. Control fully supports WPF hierarchical data binding which we show in the sample that is included with 4.1 build.

This release also includes countless improvements to existing controls, but most notably the watermark text support for our input controls: DateTimeInput, IntegerInput and DoubleInput.

DotNetBar for WPF now includes 11 controls that help you build professional WPF applications.

You can download fully functional trial release here and if you have active subscription head to our Customer Only web site and grab latest build.

Thank you for using our products! Feel free to let me know how we can make them better or what controls you would like added in future builds.

Its alive! DotNetBar 7.3 with over 50 new features and enhancements has been released. The highlight of this release is Advanced Tree Control that I covered in my previous post.
Trial version is available now. More about Tree Control can be found here. Enjoy.

Next major DotNetBar for Windows Forms 7.3 release is around the corner and it includes major new control: Advanced TreeView.

Advanced TreeView has been written from ground up to replace standard TreeView and add advanced features like multiple node selection, multi-columns, 3-state checkboxes in nodes, radio-buttons, our own text-markup support, node Super Tooltip and Node context menu support and much more. It has great looking Office 2007 style with matching scrollbars and node selection styling.

Here is screen-shot from Tree Control sample that will be included with 7.3 release:

This screen-shot shows following features:

• Node styling and optional node style spanning control width to create headers
• Check-box with 3-state support per node cell
• Option button support
• Each node cell can contain any combination of image, text and check-boxes
• Node cell parts orientation can be either horizontal or vertical

Advanced Tree control supports multiple columns with fixed and relative column width. Relative column width allows you to specify the column width using percentage of the current control width so you can easily ensure that columns fit into the available space. End-users can also change the column width, but you can disable that functionality as well.

Here is screen-shot that illustrates what you could do with that feature:

There are also following advanced features included:

• Automatic Drag & Drop support with informational events fired during drag & drop operation for complete control.
• Fantastic Drag & Drop Visual Feedback. Advanced TreeView provides excellent visual feedback while nodes are dragged including dragged node ghost image.
  Here is a screen-shot that illustrates that:

• Multiple node selection support through MultiSelect property. You can also change multi-selection rule
  to specify that only nodes belonging to same parent can be selected (default) or all nodes.
• 3 Selected Node Styles. Highlight cells style, full row select style and node marker.
• Control over node connector style. Change line type, color or thickness or hide connector completely.
• 4 Expand buttons styles including Windows Vista like style and custom expand button images.
• Node Expand button visibility control. You have complete control over expand button visibility.
• Node hot-tracking support. Highlight the mouse over node when enabled using HotTracking property.

The Release Candidate is already available to all existing subscribers while we are putting finishing touches on final release. Stay tuned for more in coming days…

Its alive, Its alive! DotNetBar for WPF 4.0 with 7 new controls is released. For a taste of what is new in this major release here is screen-shot from Editors sample that is included with the 4.0 build:

Here is list of new controls:

1. Date/Time Picker control written from ground up. This is professional Date/Time Picker not text-box with button
2. Numeric Double type input control
3. Numeric Integer type input control
4. Month Calendar control with multi-selection, multi-month display, Office 2007 style and more
5. State Animation control, animate the state transitions of any WPF control
6. Up/Down button control
7. Unique Tab Navigation control

DotNetBar for WPF 4.0 with Office 2007 Ribbon, Docking, Navigation Pane and controls added today now includes 10 controls that help you create professional WPF Applications with ease.

Fully functional trial version is available on our web site http://www.devcomponents.com/dotnetbar-wpf/

If you already have license and your subscription is active head to our Customer Only web site and grab the new release.

We are already working on next release so stay tuned for more…

New version of our very popular DotNetBar for WPF is nearing its final release. The 4.0 version adds 7 completely new controls. DotNetBar for WPF 4.0 includes total of 10 controls that will help you create professional WPF applications with ease.

Some are large and some are small, but they all are very useful. Over next couple of days I will try to cover in detail what is new.

First new control I would like to mention is the WPF Date/Time Picker control. When we first looked into which control to add next we initially skipped the date/time picker. Why? It seemed to us there are many of them already available and we wrongly assumed that they are good.

After repeated requests from our customers I decided to take a look at what is available. I was shocked. I saw text-box controls with drop-down calendars posing as date/time pickers. Ouch. You can focus that date/time picker and type any text you want into it… No validation during input or auto-complete. Its just a text-box with button next to it…

We knew why people do it this way though. It is easy!

That was not our idea of what professional Date/Time Picker control should be so we set out to make the Date/Time picker from scratch. That meant developing input control without relying on the built-in text box control.

I am happy to report that we ended up with really nice Date/Time picker 100% developed in WPF and with all the features and functionality you would expect from such control. Here is screen-shot of the control in action:

There are ton of features. Here are some:

• NULL value support so you can bind control safely to database fields
• Typed input with auto-complete where applicable
• Minimum and Maximum input date support
• Fully internationally aware
• Great custom formats support

I am confident to say that this is by far the best WPF Date/Time Picker control available.

DotNetBar for WPF 4.0  is coming soon. Stay tuned for more…

Today we released another great new version of DotNetBar for Windows Forms loaded with some very cool features. More than 30 of them… DotNetBar now has 39 controls for creating professional applications.

To start we added MaskedTextBoxAdv control, an advanced masked text box in Office 2007 style. It supports custom buttons, drop-downs, watermarking and focus highlighting. Here is small screenshot that shows this new control:

To ButtonX control we added new color scheme Blue Orb and ability to customize shape of the button. Built-in shapes include: Elliptical, Round Rectangle, and Square. You can write your own shapes easily as well. Here is the screenshot that shows new functionality in ButtonX:

We also improved Balloon control with the Office 2007 style. Now you can easily create great looking Office 2007 style alerts like one we show in Balloon sample:

Following feature has been brewing for quite some time and is finally ready for you to use. We have added the Commanding support to DotNetBar 7.2.

Commands allow you to separate the source of an action like click of a button, from the code that actually executes the action. With commands you basically decouple the UI from application logic. Commanding in DotNetBar handles communication both ways. From UI to the application logic and back from application logic to UI.

What that means is that through command you can not only execute the action that is invoked through the UI, but you can control the UI elements that use the command as well. For example you handle the Executed event on Command to execute an action that is triggered through UI and Command also has for example Enabled, and other properties, that you can use to disable all controls that use the command, change the Text or Checked state etc.

Commands are very versatile. For example, you can connect command to a LabelItem. Label is not an action element since it is purely informational so it will not cause the Executed event, but if you set the Text property on command that text will be displayed on label… So it is nice and easy way to communicate status as well.

All our items (based on BaseItem) and many controls now get new Command and CommandParameter properties.

For an in-depth overview of commanding please see this Knowledge Base Article. Also take a look at RibbonPad sample which has been updated to show Commanding in action.

There is much more good stuff in this release but this covers major items.

Fully function trial version is, as usual, available on DotNetBar for Windows Forms site.

We have some very nice additions coming in future, so stay tuned

Jim Nakashima, one of the developers of the Visual Studio.NET 2008 design-time features (Cider), on his blog looks at the WPF controls that are implementing design-time support. Recently he looked at DotNetBar for WPF design-time features we just released and here is what he says:

“DevComponents recently released their DotNetBar Suite for WPF and it is loaded with design time features. Using Cider Extensibility, DevComponents really has put together one of the richest design times I’ve seen to date.“

You can read more in his blog post…