Happy New Year Everyone!
We are starting New Year with new version of DotNetBar for Windows Forms 7.1. There are over 40 new features and enhancements in this release. DotNetBar for Windows Form now gives you 38 controls to create professional user interface with ease.
As usual you can find detailed release notes in help file.
DotNetBar works great with Visual Studio.NET 2008 and this new release will automatically integrate DotNetBar with Visual Studio 2008.
We added completely new control in this release: Horizontal and Vertical Advanced Scrollbars in Office 2007 style. Now you can replace standard scroll-bars with the great looking new ones. Here is screen-shot that shows new controls:
Notice that we have 2 styles: Standard style, which is has lighter color scheme and Application style, which has darker color scheme. Advanced Scroll-bar control will of course change its color scheme based on the Office 2007 color scheme you are using and it works great with custom generated color schemes as well.
Other enhancements in 7.1 release include:
- Vertical layout style for Slider control
- Text-markup support for Office 2007 Form caption
- Watermark behavior control for input controls where appropriate
- New installer with Visual Studio 2008 support
- Much, much more…
Fully function trial version is, as usual, available on DotNetBar for Windows Forms site.
We have some very nice additions coming in future, stay tuned 😉
Hi, guys!
I’ve tryed a couple of your releases and must say I’m excited. You offer a set of very handy components. But there is a common task that is not covered. It’s often required to have a set of components dedicated to data binding in some data-rich custom application. I mean, a set of uniformly looking components, each responsible for certain data type: single line and multiline text, fixed point and floating point numbers, date, time and datetime, text inputs with autocompletion and comboboxes. Adding or linking up a lable would sufficiently simplyfy data form design for certain classes of applications.
Can I hope to get something like this? I’ll be pleased to switch to your control set in this case 🙂
Sincerely yours, Alex
Hi Alex,
Thank you for trying DotNetBar. We already provide some of what you are looking for but not all of it in terms of exact data types. I will log your suggestions though.
DotNetBar2 ver 7.1 for VS2005/2008 is simply an excellent control library.
Good work indeed. Keep it up.
Apart from native XP and Office 2003/2007 themes, May I suggest to add native VISTA look and feel theme to DotNetBar2 WinForms and Controls? This would help when appli running on VISTA.
Hitesh, most of our controls already support the Vista theme. You just set ThemeAware=true on the control and where available they will render in Vista theme.
How about support for Stardock? is that possible? I’ve heard that Office 2007 supports Stardock, so it would be nice if we could implement something like that in our applications (though not of some great importance). Would Stardock themes work if we set the Theme Aware to true? (I am going to try it and report my results back 🙂 Btw, as a Dotnetbar user, I must say you’ve done a heck of a job. I absolutely recommend your components to all developers who wish their application to be professional and beautiful without too much hassle (plus the price is really moderate).
Pozdrav!
it works 🙂 but be warned – it can create quite a mess with the controls (especially if you have splitt buttons – setting Theme Aware to true overrides the chosen style, ie buttons no longer display text, only image). I’ve noticed that almost every control has Theme Aware property – can you suggest some way of programmaticaly assigning Theme Aware property to true? (maybe circle through controls collection on form and check for control type, and then assign the property depending on the control type?)
Thank you very much for recommending us and for using DotNetBar. I appreciate it! Thanks!
If StarDock goes through Themes API then everything that supports ThemeAware will render with StarDock themes. I think StarDock does go through themes but its been a long time since I tried it. I should probably give it a try again 🙂
You should assign ThemeAware on top-level controls like Bar, or SideBar. Going through forms Controls collection would be my first bet.
Hi Denis,
I downloaded the eval version and am trying it out. One of our configuration tools has been fairly complicated for our users and I’d like to see if we can simplify the UI somewhat for our users. I like the fact that you supply a lot of code samples with your product.
1. In the DataGridView example, when the Office 2007 black color scheme is selected, moving the mouse over custom theme colors seems to work differently than when blue or silver is selected. When black is selected, the title bar and scroll bars seem to paint differently. I am running the sample on WinXP; I haven’t tried it yet on Vista. Is this by design?
2. I see you even have a LabelX control — what is the difference between this and the standard label control?
3. The help file doesn’t list Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 as target platforms – are your components supported on these platforms?
I may have more questions, but these are a few to start off with.
Overall, it looks like you have a pretty mature product. Great work!
Thanks!
Thank you Denny for trying DotNetBar.
1. Yes that is normal. See, the color scheme generator uses two parameters to generate custom colors: base color scheme (black, blue or silver) and color of your choice. So depending on base color selected the color scheme is created. Thats why you see different result.
2. LabelX is similar to standard label but it has Office 2007 style (color mostly) and more importantly complete text-markup support. http://www.devcomponents.com/kb/questions.php?questionid=5
3. Yep both are supported.
Feel free to email support@devcomponents.com with any questions.