Today we are pleased to announce the release of WPF Elements 6.0. This version includes a huge load of improvements, features, bug fixes and a new control.
Ribbon control
The main new control in this version is the Ribbon control. A lot of users will be familiar with this control as the command hub that sits at the top of Microsoft Office applications. This control is a replacement for the Menu control and is used to categorize application commands and display them nicely to the user. Out of the box, this control supports a lot of WPF Controls including buttons, check boxes, comboboxes, numeric controls, split buttons and more. Based on the available screen real-estate, the Ribbon control will select a small, medium or large state for each control and arrange them in an optimal way. If there isn’t enough space, groups of controls will bubble down into expandable segments so the user still has access to everything.
Included with the Ribbon control is the Gallery control which is like a Ribbon-friendly list box. Items are displayed in horizontal rows and can be navigated through with smooth animations. The user can expand the whole list of items in a popup where items can be optionally categorized. Gallery controls can either be placed directly within the Ribbon control, or within the dropdown part of a split button.
A demo called “Text Formatter” is included with WPF Elements 6.0 which demonstrates all the features of the Ribbon control.
Improved DateTime axis support
Since version 1 of the Chart control, there has always been support for displaying DateTime values along the axes. The axes automatically space out the tick marks and labels which works well for numbers, but could be better for DateTime values. In WPF Elements 6.0 the axes logic for DateTime values is much improved. Labels will now be separated by proper time units rather than seemingly random intervals. For example, based on the current time range on the axis, the labels could be separated by 5 minutes, or 12 hours, or 2 days or 3 months etc. The interesting one here is monthly intervals because each month has a different number of days. The labels and tick mark spacings will be physically different to support this making the axis labels very easy to read.
Accurate data rendering.
The Chart control can handle millions of data points at once while maintaining good responsiveness. One of the ways it does this is by skipping over some of the data points so that only a few hundred points need to be rendered at once. As you zoom in, less points are skipped over so all the data can still be viewed. By default, the Chart control skips over of a constant number of data points per render. For example, the Chart may render every 10th point. This works well, but it can potentially skip extreme outlying data points and not capture an accurate shape of the data. In version 6.0 we include the IsMinMaxSamplingEnabled property on data series which when set to true will sacrifice a small amount of performance to render more accurate data. This is ideal for data that has sudden changes in the trend or outlying values. Here is a before and after shot of a trigonometry equation containing an extreme amount of spikes. For this kind of data there is a huge improvement with using this feature.
There are heaps of other additions that I’d love to tell you about but can’t fit into this blog post. For the full list, check out the Getting Started/What’s New page in the documentation that is shipped with the product. You can also see a simplified list of what’s new right here.
If you’re already a WPF Elements customer, you can upgrade to version 6.0 for free by going to your account page. If not, download the free 30 day trial to see what you’re missing out on. If you have any questions about WPF Elements, let us know in the forum. We’d also love to hear any feature requests you have.
Our friend Filip Ekberg has written a fantastic book for C# developers: ‘C# Smorgasbord’. It’s a great book so we thought we’d buy a bunch of copies to give out to people for trying out Raygun.
Filip states that the book is great for beginners through to advanced developers. What we like is the more advanced end of the book. There’s plenty of ‘Learn C# in 45 seconds’ style guides out there but sometimes it can be difficult to find a more meaty read. Filip delivers some great content for professional developers.
Here’s an example of some of the chapters:
Now, you could go out and buy a copy right now from Amazon (it’s worth it), or you could get a free copy from us!
Here’s how to win a free copy:
We will select the first 50 users who do this and send you out a copy of Filip’s great book. You also need to meet the terms. Speaking of which…
What are you waiting for? It takes minutes to integrate Raygun, you’ll get a great book for free and your software will be rock solid for years to come thanks to Raygun helping with your error reporting!
The day has finally arrived and we’re excited to announce LightSpeed 5. The worlds best .NET ORM just got even better!
Here’s a run down on some of the best improvements. Keep in mind that the change log for LightSpeed is the longest we’ve ever had so these are just the highlights — there is awesomeness sprinkled everywhere.
LightSpeed already had one of the fastest query generation processes of any .NET ORM but now we support Compiled Queries also. Compiled Queries mean that we can side step the cost of query generation almost entirely on subsequent queries where only variables change (e.g. ‘SELECT name FROM user WHERE Id = {ID}’).
Lets take a peek at how this compares between LightSpeed 4 and LightSpeed 5
Pretty impressive! 59% performance improvement in simple queries.
Of course LightSpeed has always been pretty impressive compared to what’s out there. Here’s those same numbers in comparison to Entity Framework.
You can see why software professionals pick LightSpeed. It’s not just significantly more efficient in querying, but it is also a lot easier to use and saves you valuable development hours (the many hours saved not shown in the graphs!)
Compiled queries are a cool new addition. You know what else is cool? When they get applied automatically! We’ve made sure that if you call FindById, for example, LightSpeed will internally create a compiled query so all your fetches by Id automatically go faster.
Along with automatically occurring with FindById, LightSpeed will use this technique when walking lazy loaded collections (e.g. User.Posts would use a compiled query). This means when you’re doing simple things like walking collections you’re going at maximum speed.
More speed, automatically!
We’ve included a new SQL Server 2012 data provider. This is great because we already had support for all the modern data types like SQLGeography, HierarchyID and CLR Types and now you can use LightSpeed to natively target SQL Server 2012 including leveraging the new SEQUENCE support for identity generation.
The LightSpeed Designer has been improved to help new users. It will now do nice things like offer to create a KeyTable for you if you don’t have one setup but are using the KeyTable identity type. A common speed bump for new users that we wanted to clear up.
You can also display table data for a given entity directly within Visual Studio. This helps avoid needing to fire up SQL Management Studio or other tool to see your data.
For those of you who have not worked with a Visual Studio integrated designer that doesn’t suck, you’ll find the LightSpeed Designer a breath of fresh air. It has database-first and model-first design support, smart filtering, works with a bunch of different databases and much more. You can read more about designer specific features here.
There are several other improvements to make the designer more robust, provide better error messages and improve database syncing.
You’ll love how easy LightSpeed is to use and won’t look back. If you’ve never used LightSpeed you can grab the forever free version and give it a test drive!
Existing customers with active subscriptions already have LightSpeed 5 available from their accounts.
Robbie the Robot wants you!
To try out our newest product for tracking and fixing errors - Raygun.io!
Sign up for a FREE 30 day trial, and find out how Raygun makes error collecting, reporting and management automatic and easy.
Then, if you blog about your experience with Raygun (and your honest experience at that), we’d love to send you your very own Raygun T-shirt (anywhere in the world).
Like these cool dudes are wearing!
I’m an error blasting machine.
So if you would like to do a blog review of your experience with the mighty Raygun, sign up here for your free trial, and email hilary@mindscape.co.nz to grab one of these rad T-shirts while we still have ‘em!
LightSpeed
Web Workbench
WPF Diagrams
WPF Elements
As usual the free editions of the nightly builds are available right now from the downloads page, and the full editions from the store.
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