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New versions of WPF Elements, Silverlight Elements, Phone Elements!

We’re pleased to announce a trio of releases: WPF Elements 4.1, Silverlight Elements 2.1 and Phone Elements 1.1!

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!

Visual Studio + Sass + Less + CoffeeScript = Web Workbench

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.

It’s here: LightSpeed 4.0 hits the shelves!

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!

The summer sale is here!

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!

Introducing WPF Diagrams 2.0

We’re pleased to announce the second version of WPF Diagrams, a set of controls and components for displaying and editing diagrams in Windows applications! WPF Diagrams 2.0 includes new diagram types, new pre-built shapes and a dramatically simpler API for many scenarios. You can use WPF Diagramming to construct standalone diagrams, layouts or images, or you can use it to give your users a graphical way to build ‘live’ business objects such as business processes or data analysis flows — and now it’s easier than ever!

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!