WPF Elements 5.1 Released!

We’re really pleased to be releasing WPF Elements 5.1 today with new controls, high powered performance improvements and new features. If you’re a WPF developer we think you’ll love the full WPF Elements Suite. Here’s a high level run through of key improvements in 5.1.

Data Grid Enhancements

The WPF Data Grid control in WPF Elements 5.1 is a much improved beast when compared with the 5.0 release. We had a lot of feedback from developers and we have been listening. Improvements in the 5.1 Data grid include:

• Grouping support with support for multi-level grouping and the ability to expand and collapse groups
• Exporting support (CSV exporting built in)
• Custom column sorting is supported
• Additional cell editing modes (e.g. double click to edit, etc)
• Row selection mode when clicking on a row header
• Support for hierarchical data in the same way as a TreeView control
• Allow users to add new rows which adds items to the underlying collection
• Binding to DataTable and IBindingList data sources is now supported
• RowHeaderTemplate support added for custom row headers
• ColumnHeaderTemplate support for custom column headers
• DataGrid.DisplayMemberBinding support for more complex binding scenarios without needing custom cell templates
• Background and foreground colors can be set for rows, columns or even individual cells
• Programmatically control scroll position (e.g. scroll to selected row, or end, etc)
• Auto sizing and * (star) sizing support for column widths

Of course these are just the key new features on top of our already super fast virtualized data grid engine.

Charting Enhancements

Along with the new charts detailed below, we made many improvements to the existing charts. The key focus for this release with regards to charts: Speed. LOTS OF SPEED. We already had pretty good charting performance (one customer compared against 10 different WPF Charting options and found we provided the best speed + features offering. They’ll be impressed with this release then!).

We’ll be posted more about these improvements in the coming days. Improvements in performance are across all chart types – you don’t need to choose between features and performance with WPF Elements!

Other charting enhancements include:

• BarSeries, StackedBarSeries and ScatterSeries now support millions of data points.
• Setting ChartAxis.IsSliderVisible to true will display the built-in axis slider. This is an alternate way for the user to zoom and pan the chart.
• You can now specify the starting value of the logarithmic axis scale.
• MarkedStripeGrid supports both vertical and horizontal orientations.
• You can now specify the logical position of the baseline in bar charts.
• You can now specify the number of minor tick marks rendered between major tick marks.
• Setting the DataSeries.IsShownInLegend property can hide the legend item for that series.

New Chart: Boxplot

WPF Elements now includes the WPF Boxplot. It’s built on the same high performance core charting engine as all the other charts in WPF Elements.

New Chart: Candle Stick

WPF Elements users also get the WPF Candle Stick chart. A handy chart for financial data and, like all other charts, super fast as well!

New Chart: Stock Chart

The third new chart type added is the WPF Stock Chart. Guess what? It’s also super fast and built on the same engine as the other charts!

It’s not all charts and grids!

While the Data Grid and Charts got a good number of enhancements and performance boosts, we love all our controls the same. A few of the other changes found across the suite are:

• You can now template the various scheduler dialog boxes. This is useful for providing custom styles or for localizing the labels.
• Added a new IntegerUpDown control.
• Added PercentageTextBox control.
• Some more free WPF controls included in our free suite (we’ll post more about this later)

Dig in, build awesome apps

Last but not least is that we’ve added more samples to our sample explorer that’s included in all releases of WPF Elements. You can explore new functionality, examine the code used to make that sample and adjust the look and feel from within the sample explorer. Once you’ve installed WPF Elements you can find the Sample Explorer in the Start Menu. If you need a hand getting started, we would love to help.

Get the 60 day free trial of WPF Elements 5.1
Existing customers can download 5.1 from their account

• By John-Daniel Trask
• On 31 May 2012

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Tagged as Products, WPF, WPF Elements