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!

In the meantime, some rather more mundane developments in the latest nightly builds…

LightSpeed

• New Show Data command for, well, showing your data
• Fixes for certain CTI join scenarios

NHibernate Designer

• We now support per-project code generation templates for you hacker types

WPF Diagrams

• Added new hit testing methods, and fixed a bug in the FindElementAtPoint method

WPF Elements

• UI zooming and panning support for alternate Y axes

Silverlight Elements

• UI zooming and panning support for alternate Y axes

All these updates are available in the current nightly builds — free editions from the downloads page, full editions from the store.

LightSpeed

• Compiled queries! Yay!
• Fix for an error when projecting only base class fields while filtering only on derived class fields in class table inheritance
• Fix for a class table inheritance cascade delete issue
• Fixed a column mapping issue with unversioned partial updates
• Fix for BeginEdit on a distributed entity

WPF Diagrams

• Performance and functionality improvements to the A* pathfinder
• Added an option for marquee selection to select when the marquee intersects a node rather than only when it wholly contains a node

WPF Elements

• Fixed an error when typing non-Latin characters into a numeric text box
• Fixed an issue where the minimum and maximum values of an alternate Y axis could not be set automatically

Phone Elements

• Fixed an issue where the minimum and maximum values of an alternate Y axis could not be set automatically
• Fixed a font sizing issue with the picker controls

Silverlight Elements

• Fixed an issue where the minimum and maximum values of an alternate Y axis could not be set automatically. Coincidentally enough

All these features and fixes are in the current nightly builds. Free editions are available from the downloads page, and full editions from the store.

LightSpeed

• Fixes for a couple of issues with cascading deletes into and through a class table inheritance hierarchy
• Fix for a join issue
• Backstop for when an indirect circular association could lead to a stack overflow
• Optimisation to avoid saving unmodified foreign keys when performing a partial update
• Ensure that a nullable foreign key is nulled out when the association is nulled out through a cascade delete
• Designer support for ForeignKeyFieldAttribute on one-to-one associations

Silverlight Elements

• Fixed some localisation bugs in the scheduler control

WPF Diagrams

• We’ve added a hook that allows you to keep the same element IDs when deserialising and re-serialising a diagram
• Added some options to simplify toolbox styling
• Added an option to the A* pathfinder to avoid parallel connection overlaps

Web Workbench

• We’ve fixed an issue where some users were getting a “custom tool failed” error after rebooting
• Added support for functions as mixin arguments
• Added support for Sass @each loops

SimpleDB Management Tools

• Added export to XML

As usual, free editions from the downloads page, retail editions from the store, and VS2010 extensions from the Updates tab in Extension Manager.

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!

LightSpeed

• Fix for multiple spurious loads when forcing a load by redundantly setting an association property
• Fix for presence validation on value object fields
• Added support for querying the presence or absence of an association from the non-foreign-key end of a one-to-one association
• Fix for an entity getting a replacement change tracker when you added it to a many-to-many association
• VerboseLogging can now be set through the configuration file
• Fix for cascade delete when removing the non-FK end of a one-to-one association to a class table inheritance derived class
• Fixed an issue with combining Single with Take(1)
• Added right-click > Add New Entity menu command, for you folks who are too cool to hang out in the Toolbox with everyone else

WPF Diagrams

• Added support for setting position calculators in code

Silverlight Elements

• Added radial gauge control

WPF Elements

• Added radial gauge control

You can download the radial gauge control right now through the current nightly builds. For the trial versions, check out the Downloads page, or go to your account page if you are a customer.

This control provides all the basic functionality of displaying a value between a specified range, and animating the needle as the current value changes. If there are other types of gauge controls that you would like us to implement, or if there are features you would like us to add to the radial gauge then we would love to hear from you. Let us know by leaving a comment on this blog post, or come visit our forums: Phone Elements, WPF Elements, Silverlight Elements.

LightSpeed

• Fix for nulling a foreign key not removing the entity from the parent’s children collection
• Fix for changes not being tracked when nulling a one-to-one association
• Fix for order by’s not being aliased correctly when there is a sequence numbering alias applied because a parent instance of a table is in scope.
• Fix for association change tracking not being reset during SaveChanges
• Added option flag for removing deleted entities from the unit of work after the delete has been committed
• You can now specify the same grouping key multiple times with different functions applied to it

WPF Elements

• Fix for a possible negative width error in rose charts

Silverlight Elements

• Fix for a possible negative width error in rose charts

Phone Elements

• Fix for a possible negative width error in rose charts. (Did you guess?)

WPF Diagrams

• SelectedElementsChanged was not always being raised when using marquee select
• Fix for XML serialisation in cultures that use a different numeric format from the invariant culture

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!

WPF Diagrams

• Ongoing improvements to the zoom-to-centre feature
• Fixed a potential issue when data binding the Diagram and Formatter properties

LightSpeed

• Fix for database synchronisation failing if you quoted the database name in the SQL Server connection string
• Fix for column names on value object fields causing the prefix to be ignored during Update Database
• Added support for server-side entity projections so that subsequent traversals can be performed server-side
• Added LINQ support for Convert.ToInt32 method

Phone Elements

• You can now use DataSeries.Visibility to collapse individual data series
• Fixed an error when setting the ItemsSource of a stacked series before adding it to a chart in code
• DataSeries.SelectedDataPoint can now be used as a binding source
• DataSeries.SelectedDataPoint is now cleared when necessary
• Added DataSeries.SelectedDataPointChanged event
• StackedBarSeries can now create side-by-side stacked bar charts
• Now includes an initial drop of the polar charts from Silverlight Elements. You should consider this experimental for now!

Silverlight Elements

• Fixed an error when setting the ItemsSource of a stacked series before adding it to a chart in code
• DataSeries.SelectedDataPoint can now be used as a binding source
• DataSeries.SelectedDataPoint is now cleared when necessary
• Fixed event handlers still being hooked up after a series was removed from a chart
• Added ChartAxis.MinimumRange property
• Minor updates to polar chart mouse events
• Added visual states for polar bars
• Added selection modes for polar series and PolarChart control
• Numerous performance enhancements

WPF Elements

• Added Enter key handling for AutoCompleteBox
• Added DataSeries.SelectedDataPointChanged event
• Fixed event handlers still being hooked up after a series was removed from a chart
• StackedBarSeries can now create side-by-side stacked bar charts
• Added ChartAxis.MinimumRange property
• Numerous performance enhancements
• We proudly note a commit comment consisting solely of the character “!”, nicely rounding off Victor Hugo Tribute Week here at Mindscape HQ

Whew! Get ‘em before Jason collapses from exhaustion — free editions from the downloads page, retail editions from the store!