• 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!

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!

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!

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

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.)

This point release occurs at the same time as it represents primarily the addition of new charting types across the product line and the sharing of performance improvements across them all. There is also a roll up of individual product improvements in each product as well.

What’s new in all three products?

• Polar charts including rose charts, radar charts and polar scatter/bubble charts
• Additional events for interactive chart usage (e.g. DataSeries.SelectedDataPointChanged)
• Added ChartAxis.MinimumRange, TitleVisibility and LabelStep properties
• DataSeries.Visibility can be used to collapse a series on the chart
• Additional performance improvements

We have also rolled up a number of general enhancements – for example basic image support in the Silverlight Rich Text Editor, improved keyboard navigation in the Book and Coverflow controls and new colour palettes for WPF and Silverlight.

This brings the number of overall controls to 45+ for WPF Elements, 40+ for Silverlight Elements and 30+ for Phone Elements. If you haven’t tried these products before but want to create amazing user experiences you can download the trials free from the download page. Customers already have the latest builds available on their account pages.

To whet your appetite, here’s an example application built using WPF Elements charting:

 

 

We would, as always, love to hear your feedback on what’s new and what you’d like to see in the future.

Happy coding!

You may have noticed that this new-fangled Web thing is getting quite a bit of traction at the moment. And these days you can’t get away with static Web pages built with table-based layouts and presentational markup. It’s all script this and stylesheet that and jQuery the other. Why, even those time-hallowed animated GIFs of little men digging now incur only sneers from the Weberati.

But when you’re writing one of these modern Web pages, don’t you find yourself wishing for something a bit less repetitive than CSS and a bit neater and safer than JavaScript? Well, you’re not alone. A bunch of smart folks have invented extensions and alternatives: languages that do the same jobs as CSS and JavaScript, but are a bit easier on your fingers and your brain. Three prominent productivity languages are Sass and Less, which provide extensions to CSS to reduce duplication and promote reuse, and CoffeeScript, which provides a simpler and safer syntax than JavaScript but still compiles down to JavaScript to run in the browser.

Today, we’re releasing a FREE Visual Studio extension that supports all three of these languages. Mindscape Web Workbench gives you Visual Studio syntax highlighting for Sass, Less and CoffeeScript, and automatically generates the corresponding CSS and JavaScript into your Web project so you can just reference it on your Web pages as though you’d written it by hand*. For Sass and Less, Web Workbench also provides Intellisense, outlining, “go to definition” support — very handy for navigating around large stylesheets — and of course the ever-popular error squigglies!

How does it work? Easy! Just install it into Visual Studio 2010 from the Gallery or using the Extension Manager, and you’ll see three new templates in the Web tab of the Add Item dialog — Sass SCSS Style Sheet, Less Style Sheet and CoffeeScript File. Choose the one you want and start coding — we’ll do the rest! Take a look at the Getting Started guide for more information. And of course the Sass, Less and CoffeeScript home pages are full of great information on the languages themselves.

We think Sass, Less and CoffeeScript are great little helpers for Web developers, and Web Workbench is our way of sharing the love. Give them a try and see if you don’t fall in love too!

As always, we love to hear feedback. Are there other features or improvements you’d like to see in Web Workbench? Have you found a *gasp* bug? Would you like to see us add support for your favourite Web productivity language? Let us know in the forums!

You can learn more about Web Workbench here, or download it FREE from the Visual Studio Gallery here.

Happy coding!

* For Less files, we don’t generate CSS because Less files are typically referenced directly and translated to CSS within the browser. See the Getting Started guide for a link to the Less JavaScript include file.

Over 1,000 commits, 5,422 file changes, 70,000 words of documentation, and many months of work, and we’re now ready to unveil LightSpeed 4.0 to the world! There is so much packed into LightSpeed 4 that this blog post won’t cover it all but we’ll dig deeper over the coming weeks.

Lets start by looking at the highlights!

Distributed Data – LightSpeed everywhere

One of the design goals of LightSpeed 4 was that LightSpeed should be the center of your data access world. While LightSpeed is much much more than just data access, this called for looking at how we could build a Distributed Unit Of Work to help shuttle data around between rich clients, phones, internet applications and more. Distributed data is the big feature of LightSpeed 4 and the feedback we’ve received to date has been great. You can now write your client side code and have LightSpeed automatically and transparently operate over the wire as if you were working locally. You can read more about these capabilities in an earlier blog post where I hinted at what was to come.

Moving beyond data – Web Application support

LightSpeed 4 makes it easier than ever to integrate your entities into your Web applications. Whether you’re using Web Forms or ASP.NET MVC, LightSpeed now includes a bunch of helper classes and extensions for web developers. Included are binding helpers, a base controller for further encapsulating your unit of work handling and support for enabling DataAnnotation based validation from your LightSpeed model

We’ve built these not only to make LightSpeed integration scenarios easier, but also to help you build better web solutions. One very cool addition is Mindscape’s contract based routing enhancements for ASP.NET MVC which allows you to specify routes on controller interfaces and have the web application generate the routes for your automatically at run time. We have used this internally on various projects and presented it at Tech Ed and found it a massive boost over the default routing configuration.

Power programming with LightSpeed metadata

With its simple and intuitive API and powerful RAD designer workflow, LightSpeed is well known for being super easy for newcomers to pick up and start running with. The challenge was that experienced LightSpeed users wanted to dig around in the internals and really start getting all meta with their database entities. To avoid making the default LightSpeed API surface large and scary to new users we’re shipping Mindscape.LightSpeed.MetaData.dll. This assembly exposes internal data about entities, properties and fields to developers. I covered some of the possibilities of what developers could achieve with the new meta data extensions in an earlier post.

Auditing additions

LightSpeed now includes a light weight auditing solution to help track who created, updated and deleted your entities – not just when. Auditing is already in use with serveral of our early adopter customers. Ivan wrote about adding this feature to nightly builds at the time.

New samples and documentation

This is a big one for existing customers and new users! LightSpeed now ships with a 336 page user guide in PDF form to help developers get the most out of LightSpeed. There’s the API CHM and a smaller tighter ‘Getting Started’ guide but we felt it would be beneficial to provide a great user guide to developers as well.

LightSpeed 4 ships with 7 samples for a mixture of Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010. Covering ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web Forms, WCF, WPF, RIA Services and much more you’ll be sure to find a sample that gives some you the examples you need to start getting the most from LightSpeed. Each sample also includes a walk through guide to explain certain aspects of the solution which help highlight some of the useful aspects of LightSpeed.

And so very very much more

A more complete change log can be found in the Upgrade Guide included with LightSpeed, but here’s an overview of other enhancements:

• Updated database providers
• Sub-namespace support in designer
• Enum discriminators in designer
• Entity default settings policy in designer
• New display options in the designer
• Per-entity colours in the designer
• Designer migrations extensibility
• Numerous minor designer extensions and improvements
• Table and index hint support
• Minor enhancements to command line tools
• Custom entity construction using EntityFactory
• Reference data support
• Many new queries and functions supported in LINQ

A huge thank you

We had amazing feedback from so many customers who took up the beta opportunity. The feedback directly impacted the product and was absolutely beyond what we expected. Thank you for supporting Mindscape and the LightSpeed product.

This has been a huge project for Mindscape and we cannot wait to see how developers use LightSpeed 4. The feedback we receive really is what makes the whole team enjoy working on creating the very best developer tools.

Where to get it

Customers can immediately download LightSpeed 4 from their account pages. Folks who haven’t yet taken the leap to LightSpeed can download the free edition (limited only by number of entity class definitions) and see what all the fuss is about!

While you are downloading, check out the trailer!

Note: This sale has now ended.

For our friends in the northern hemisphere it’s that time of the year – it’s warming up and there’s a holiday approaching. We thought it would be a great time to offer a special for the summer so that you have a great toolbox at your disposal for when you’re coding away on the beach.

Here’s the deal:

For the price of our WPF or Silverlight suites you can get a full Mindscape Mega Pack upgrade at no extra charge! And to save you money in the long run we’ll also add an additional six months of updates! Now that will afford you a few extra Mojitos!

So that’s every Mindscape product — WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone, LightSpeed, SimpleDB, you name it — and 18 whole months of nightly builds, upgrades and entirely new products! All at a fraction of the price of other competing suites.

Throw on your skate shoes and roll over to the Summer Sale Page!

New shape diagrams…

To the existing repertoire of flow diagrams and star diagrams, we’ve now added absolutely positioned or ‘shape’ diagrams. Unlike flow diagrams and star diagrams, shape diagrams don’t have any logic associated with them, so they can be used for a wide variety of situations — from instructional graphics to UI prototyping to kitchen design! Users can move shapes around and connect them up as required.

…and goodbye separate products!

Part of our massive set of improvements in WPF Diagrams 2 is to merge the old Flow Diagrams and Star Diagrams products into a single product. We did this because WPF Diagrams 2 brings together all the capabilities of cyclic and acyclic diagrams — as well as adding so much more. And you’re not limited to shape, flow and star diagrams: we’ve made it easier to define your own diagram types so if you’re building anything from a BPMN editor to a circuit diagramming solution, WPF Diagrams is the product for you!

Pre-built shapes

We’ve also hugely expanded the number of shapes built into WPF Diagramming. Nearly 80 shapes are pre-defined, from basic geometrical shapes like rectangles, stars and ellipses, through block arrows including curved arrows, callouts and multi-way callouts, to conventional flowchart and system design shapes like decisions, sort or merge operations, storage and the ever popular punched tape.

Of course, you’re not limited to our shapes: it’s easy to define custom shapes so if you’re building the next Balsamiq clone or circuit diagramming solution you’ll be right at home with WPF Diagrams 2.

Smarter layout options

We’ve improved and added new layout algorithms for diagrams and connections, including an A* pathfinder for fast, non-colliding connection routing and a force based layout algorithm for that sproingy effect everyone loves so much. The layout classes now work with all diagrams, not just flow or star diagrams.

New toolbox control

We’ve always had great support for creating diagram nodes and connections from a toolbox, with a variety of interaction modes and handy previews. In WPF Diagrams 2.0 we’ve added a dedicated toolbox control with grouping and filtering to make it easy to work with large numbers of node types.

Simpler API

The WPF Diagrams Foundation API provides a huge amount of flexibility, but many applications don’t need that flexibility. So for applications that just want to get it done, we’ve added a simpler API which makes it much easier to build shape-oriented diagramming applications. The new high-level API allow you to use pre-built shapes, define your own shapes and style your diagrams in just a few lines of XAML, without diving into the Foundation API.

We’ve also taken the opportunity to clean up the existing API a little. We’ve merged some overlapping properties, and significantly reworked the XML serialiser to make it easier to extend to support custom data and custom node types. (These are breaking changes so if you are an existing 1.x user you may want to keep a copy of the 1.x DLLs around until you have time to migrate. We’ll provide more info about this in a subsequent post.)

Learn more

WPF Diagrams is bursting at the seams with capability – your imagination really is the only limitation for what you can achieve with the new version. Find out more about what is can do, and see more examples of the awesome visuals you can create on our WPF Diagrams page. Check it out!

Try it out

Want to take it out for a spin? You can download the trial edition of WPF Diagrams 2.0 for free. And we’re offering a limited launch discount.

Existing Mega Pack and WPF Diagrams customers already have the version 2 installation files in their accounts.

Take it for a spin and let us know what you think!