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Archive for July, 2010

Mindscape teams up with ComponentSource

Tagged as General, News, Products

We’re pleased to announce that ComponentSource and Mindscape have teamed up to promote Mindscape products through the ComponentSource websites and online media channels.

This is great news for organisations that have reseller policies, policies around making purchases from local organisation (we’re looking at you, US businesses!) and US Government organisations.

Currently ComponentSource have LightSpeed and Silverlight Elements available on their websites. It is possible for users to add reviews so if you’d like to share your experiences with our products we would appreciate you adding your review on ComponentSource.

If you have any questions please post a comment.

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 12 July 2010

WPF Elements 3.0 – Important notice for WPF customers

Tagged as News, Products, WPF, WPF Elements, WPF Property Grid

In the next couple of weeks we will be shipping WPF Elements 3.0, it will be the largest shake up to our WPF product line up to date and is great news for all our WPF Elements, WPF Property Grid and WPF Themes customers. Personally, I can’t wait to see this update come out and see some of the great applications that people will build with all the upgraded offering! :-)

Some important notes about the new release that all WPF customers should be aware of:

WPF Property Grid

We will be merging our WPF Property Grid control into the WPF Elements family. It will no longer be a stand alone product to purchase from our store. It’s interesting and a little sad to see it go as its own standalone product as it was Mindscape’s second product that was released to market but it’s also an important step in continuing maturity of our WPF offering.

What does this mean for existing customers? If you own the WPF Property Grid product you will automatically be migrated to owning WPF Elements 3.0 as part of your active subscription for free.

WPF Themes

We released a WPF Themes product that included 5 themes for all the built in WPF controls. We’ve decided that this would be better bundled up with WPF Elements 3.0 as well and will also be discontinuing the WPF Themes individual product when WPF Elements 3.0 is released.

What does this mean for existing customers? If you own the WPF Themes product you will automatically be migrated to owning WPF Elements 3.0 as part of your active subscription for free.

WPF Elements 3.0

Beyond doing the product line up tango, WPF Elements will also get a big upgrade by way of new features in existing controls and new control additions. We’ve received wonderful feedback from customers about what they would like to see added (for example, a WPF Scheduler control like the Outlook calendar) and I’m looking forward to seeing how customers make use of them.

Price changes – the call-to-action part of this post!

With WPF Elements 3.0 we will be increasing the price of the product which is why we’re making this announcement now. If you are currently evaluating any of our WPF products then it would be a very good idea to purchase a 12 month subscription today and lock in the current pricing for the next 12 months. If you already have a subscription, you may wish to extend it for another 12 months now. This will represent a substantial saving over buying the products or renewing them once WPF Elements 3.0 is released. Also, note that if you have an inactive subscription, you can still re-activate it and renew for 12 months at a reduced amount from your account page.

Existing customers can extend their subscriptions here
Cannot-wait-to-be-customers can purchase from the store here

We hope that you’ll love the new WPF Elements when we launch it later in July.

Happy coding!

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 8 July 2010

Nightly news, 9 July 2010

Tagged as LightSpeed, Silverlight Elements, WPF Elements

Here’s the updates and fixes in the latest nightly builds.

LightSpeed

• Added support for ToString() and Convert.ToString() in LINQ expressions
• Fix for aliasing issue in joins
• Removed some validation options from the designer for data types where they didn’t make sense (for example, length validations on boolean properties)
• Fixed an issue with using SqlXxx data types that was causing problems for SQL Server 2008 spatial queries
• Support composite (&& and ||) expressions in Where Any and All clauses. (Limited to a single && or || on VistaDB due a parameter handling issue.)
• Added support for projections in join criteria
• Added support for scoped subqueries in a LINQ Where clause
• Fixed an issue with scalar queries in class table inheritance, which also affected unique validations
• Support Query.Identifier in “update by query”

WPF Elements

• Added a 24-hour clock display option, Maximum and Minimum constraints, TimeSuggestionInterval option and input masking to the TimePicker control
• Fixed an issue with separator display in numeric text boxes

Silverlight Elements

• Added an ObservableDictionary class

These fixes and enhancements are in the current nightly builds — grab the free editions from the downloads page or the retail editions from the store.

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 8 July 2010

Nightly news, 2 July 2010

Tagged as LightSpeed, Silverlight Elements

With the football finally over (and, going by local press coverage, New Zealand having won), development has been proceeding apace at Mindscape HQ. We’re hoping to announce a couple of launches in the near future, but in the meantime, here’s what’s new in this week’s nightly builds.

Silverlight Elements

• The MulticolumnTreeView control now supports alternating row colours.
• We’ve added the new MultiCalendar control to our custom styles.

LightSpeed

• We’ve fixed a limitation on eager loading on inheritance hierarchies. Previously we would only eager load associations declared at or above the level of the queried type. We now also eager load associations declared on derived types.
• Also on the inheritance theme, we’ve fixed a bug which resulted in incorrect SQL when a query involved an associated object of a class table inheritance derived type, but the property in the query was declared on a base type rather than the associated type.
• We’ve fixed an issue which could cause entity settings not to be displayed in the VS2008 designer.
• We’ve added a way to decouple property and field names. This can be handy in inheritance scenarios, where a column can mean different things depending on which derived class you’re in.

All of these fixes and enhancements are available in the current nightly builds, available from the store or (for free and trial editions) from the downloads page.

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 1 July 2010