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New Web Workbench features

Tagged as Products, Web Workbench

We’ve just shipped another update to Web Workbench, our popular Visual Studio add-in for Sass, Less and CoffeeScript. Here’s what’s new in the latest version:

• If you use a built-in Sass or Less function, such as the hsl function to express a colour in hue-saturation-value format, we’ll now show the coveted ‘blue squiggly’ if you supply an incorrect number of arguments, or if you use named arguments and get the names wrong, with a hover tip to show the correct syntax.
• If you’ve got the Pro edition, we’ll also display popup signature help for built-in functions as you type.
• Comment/uncomment support. You can now comment and uncomment blocks of code using the standard Visual Studio ‘comment/uncomment block’ commands. (Comment/uncomment is a Pro edition feature.)
• And a number of fixes for bugs and glitches.

To get Web Workbench, choose Tools > Extension Manager, select Online Gallery and search for “Mindscape Web Workbench.” To update your existing copy, go into Extension Manager and check the Updates tab (and be patient, we think the update server must be running on SharePoint or something). Happy coding!

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 17 January 2012

Kick start 2012 with this special offer!

Tagged as LightSpeed, MegaPack, News, NHibernate Designer, Phone Elements, Products, Silverlight Elements, SimpleDB Management Tools, Web Workbench, WPF Diagrams, WPF Elements

Make building better software your New Year’s resolution by taking advantage of our 30% sale on the Mega Pack.

For a limited time, pay only $699 and you’ll receive:

• LightSpeed O/R Mapper (normally $349)
• WPF Elements (normally $699)
• WPF Diagrams (normally $699)
• Silverlight Elements (normally $699)
• Phone Elements for WP7 (normally $299)
• NHibernate Designer (normally $99)
• SimpleDB Management Tools (normally $29)
• Web Workbench (normally $29)
• Visual Tools for SharePoint (normally $349)

Plus, you also get:

• 12 months of new releases, nightly builds and new products!
• The best support in the business!

Imagine that – a full range of developer tools across WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone, Data Access, Web Development and Domain Modeling for just $699!

So, save thousands of dollars by getting all your tools at once with our 30% off Mega Pack Special now.

Hurry, promotion ends 1 Feb 2012!

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 12 January 2012

FREE: 5 Professional WPF Themes

Tagged as News, Products, WPF, WPF Elements

Everyone loves free things! With the recent release of WPF Elements 5 we decided to beef up the free WPF control pack even more. Now in addition to the already free WPF controls you will find 5 professionally built themes to bring your applications to life.

5 superbly crafted themes
We have poured months of effort into creating pixel perfect themes both for the standard WPF controls and the WPF Elements controls. There’s Office Blue, Office Black, Office Silver, Expression (Alloy) and Expression Light (Alloy Light). You’ll be impressed by how easy these themes are to add to your project and your users will be really impressed at how great the application looks.

Autocomplete Text Box for WPF

Autocomplete text boxes are great. We’ve made some great additions to this control recently and it will really help bring your applications up a level. Check out the new multi-value autocomplete box support that was included recently.

Coverflow for WPF

Popularised in iTunes, Coverflow is a unique way of presenting data to your users. Beyond just static images and thanks to the power of WPF you will find you can set any arbitrary content as your covers — images, videos, other WPF controls, whatever you want! We’ve seen some imaginative uses of the Coverflow control over the years. You will be pleased to find everything you need in the box to configure the display exactly as you want it to be.

Prompt Decorator for WPF

This control adds a polish to your applications. Want to have hint text on your text box and drop down lists? Say “Search” appearing in your search box but disappearing when the user clicks in it? It couldn’t be easier with the Prompt Decorator control.

Get the free controls with the WPF Elements 5 installer. You’re welcome to use the controls and themes listed here at no charge, with no royalties.

Happy coding!

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 13 December 2011

Working with the Data Grid – Day 1

Tagged as Products, WPF, WPF Elements

As we’ve previously mentioned, WPF Elements 5 comes with a powerful new control for displaying data in a tabular format, the Data Grid. While I could write about its super fast performance under heavy loads, or its many options, the first thing to mention is how to get a Data Grid up on the screen. Fortunately that’s a simple matter, and in this introductory post I’ll be showing you how to do just that. From there the Data Grid is easily sculpted to fit the needs of your application, and over this series I’ll continue the process by showing you how to build a fully functional data grid customized to specifications.

You might like to check out the demos of the Data Grid in the Sample Explorer that comes bundled with the 60 day trial of WPF Elements. Alongside being able to see the Data Grid in action XAML and code samples are included, ready to inspire your own applications.

But for now we shall build one from scratch! Where to begin?

Setting up the references

The easiest way is to add a reference to WpfElements.dll and then drag a Data Grid control from the toolbox onto your Window or Page. This will add the licenses.licx file to your properties folder and also add the following namespace to your XAML:

xmlns:ms="http://namespaces.mindscape.co.nz/wpf"

Our Data Grid is going to be fairly uninteresting without binding it to a model. To save time I’ve made the following simple example to populate the grid; you can download the source code here and put it in the code-behind (the archive also includes the finished XAML).

We’re ready to go! Here’s the code:

<Grid>
  <ms:DataGrid ItemsSource="{Binding Data}" />
</Grid>

The Data Grid was designed following WPF best practices therefore setting its model is like any other WPF control – just bind the ItemsSource property to a collection of data. Run it, edit cell data, rearrange column order by dragging and dropping, click on a column header to sort – all behave as expected. All with one line of XAML!

You’ll notice that some of the column widths are a little small for many of the records. Also, while the Generic theme is perfectly serviceable, we’ve got five other theme options so we could apply one of those too. Column widths are set inside the DataGrid control as follows:

<ms:DataGrid ItemsSource="{Binding Data}">
  <ms:DataGrid.Columns>
    <ms:DataGridColumn PropertyName="Name" Width="120" />
    <ms:DataGridColumn PropertyName="Address" Width="140" />
    <ms:DataGridColumn PropertyName="Balance" Width="60" />
  </ms:DataGrid.Columns>      
</ms:DataGrid>

As for the theme, I’ll be setting the entire window theme, but if you just want to set the Data Grid control that’s available by setting the ResourceDictionary inside ms:DataGrid.Resources.

<Window.Resources>
  <ResourceDictionary>
    <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
      <ms:OfficeBlue />
    </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
  </ResourceDictionary>
</Window.Resources>

Feel free to check out how OfficeSilver, OfficeBlack, Alloy and AlloyLight look too. The finished result:

As you can see it’s fairly easy to get the Data Grid up and running! In future posts we’ll look at some of the properties we can set on the Data Grid, to control sorting, column reordering, selection modes and of course the editors, both built-in and custom. Finally we’ll apply a custom colored template to the Balance column!

Head on over and grab the 60 day trial of WPF Elements to try out the Data Grid and over 50 other controls here:
Download WPF Elements

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Posted by CallumG on 12 December 2011

NHibernate Designer 2: Roadmap

Tagged as News, NHibernate Designer, Products

The NHibernate Designer has been out for a wee while now and we’ve received some great feedback from developers who use it. With that in mind and with recent requests we wanted to share our roadmap for what we are imaginatively calling NHibernate Designer 2!

File-per-class generation
Currently the NHibernate Designer outputs all of the generated classes into one file. Even though this is code generated and shouldn’t be edited we got strong feedback from developers that they preferred a file per class approach. NHibernate Designer 2 will include the option to generate a file per class if desired.

Set up NHibernate configuration in more detail
NHibernate Designer already gives developers a starting point for their NHibernate configuration (right click the design surface -> getting started). To help new users get started quicker we’re overhauling this much loved feature to include the ability to visually configure how you would like NHibernate configured and then generate the appropriate configuration block! It can’t get easier than that.

Migrations support
We’re looking at porting the Visual Studio integrated migrations framework from LightSpeed into the NHibernate Designer. This provides for schema migrations that can be created and executed from within Visual Studio, creation of migration SQL scripts and also includes command line tools for running migrations on servers without Visual Studio installed. The LightSpeed migration engine includes support for several database engines (SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, etc).

Migrations can be created based on your model changes within Visual Studio, giving you a big leg up in creating your migrations.

We’ve also had feedback asking about third party migration frameworks. Is this important to you? Why? Leave a comment and let us know!

More chocolate sprinkles
Other ideas we’re tossing around include the ability to execute queries from within Visual Studio, model checking (validation and ‘lint’-type advice), and filtered views a la LightSpeed. If you like the sound of any of these then do let us know — your feedback helps us to prioritise features and decide where to make the cut!

We want to hear from you
This post as highlighted some of the key improvements we’re adding to the NHibernate Designer for version 2. There are plenty of other tweaks and improvements that will be included. Much of the current roadmap has come from user feedback — thank you to those who have provided it to date! And if you haven’t told us about your fondest wish then leave a comment to let us know — it’s not too late! (Heck, it’s never too late. Even after we ship it, it still won’t be too late.)

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 4 August 2011