WPF Elements

• Added Chart.ForceRender method for special scenarios.
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• Added DataSeriesSelected event to Chart, raised when a new series has been clicked on
• Resolved the scenario when a DateTimePicker contains a lone “ddd” or “dddd” component
• Added basic min/max feature to the DateTimePicker.
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• Added TimeExplorer.CanEditRangeMagnitude property.
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• Adjustments to the new DataGrid MouseOverCell feature.
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• Resolved an exception in the PropertyGrid collection editor.
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• Added ChartMouseRightButtonDown and ChartMouseRightButtonUp events.
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• Selected data series logic.
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• The ChartGrid now aquires the new axes of its parent chart if they change.
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WPF Diagrams

• Added TreeLayoutAlgorithm.StationaryNode property.
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• The AStarPathfinder now respects the IsUserModified connection property
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Silverlight Elements

• Resolved a minor bug with displaying data labels.
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As usual the free editions of the nightly builds are available right now from the downloads page, and the full editions from the store.

Enabling the Spell Checker

To enable the built-in spell checker, simply set the IsSpellCheckingEnabled property of our RichTextEditor to true.

<ms:RichTextEditor x:Name="TextEditor" IsSpellCheckingEnabled="True" />

As the user is editing the text, the well known red squiggly lines appear under any words not found in the dictionary. By default, the United States dictionary will be used for checking the spelling. A UK dictionary is also available which you can use by setting the SpellingDictionary property to UnitedKingdom.

Right clicking on a misspelt word will display a context menu of suggestions. The suggestion list is ordered with the most likely correct word at the top. Selecting one of the suggestions will replace the misspelt word.

Spelling Dialog

The HTML editor also comes with a built-in spelling dialog which will be familiar to Microsoft Office users. The dialog lets the user navigate through each misspelt word in the document and either ignore the word, or change it to one of the suggestions. There are also commands for applying changes to all the same misspelt words in the document. The dialog can be opened by pressing the spell check button in the HTML toolbar. By default the button is not displayed, so to display it, simply set the IsSpellCheckButtonVisible property on the StandardRichTextEditorToolBar to true.

<ms:StandardRichTextEditorToolBar Editor="{Binding ElementName=TextEditor}" IsSpellCheckButtonVisible="True" />

More New Features

Here are some other new features in the latest version of the HTML editor that you may be interested in:

• Tab key support
  By default, the Tab key is used to navigate focus to the next control in the Silverlight application. By setting the RichTextEditor.CanHandleTabKey property to true, the Tab key will be used for indenting paragraphs. Pressing the Tab key at the very start of a paragraph will indent the first line. In HTML, this is the text-indent style. Pressing the Tab key anywhere else will cause the whole paragraph to be indented. This affects the padding-left style in the HTML output. Pressing Shift+Tab will reverse the effects. The TabSize property can be used to specify the pixel size of the tab.
• Hex Color Encoding
  By default, the HTML output that the control produces will encode foreground and background colors using the RGB format. If you set the RichTextEditor.ColorEncoding property to Hex, then the HTML output will use hex encoding for the colors. When importing HTML, the editor will happily accept both color formats.
• Copy Rich Formatting
  The editor now also preserves rich text formatting when copying and pasting within the editor.

To take advantage of these new features in your applications, make sure to download the latest nightly build. You can download the free trial version from here, or go to your account page if you’re already a customer. If you have any questions or feature requests, let us know in the forum.

WPF Elements

• Fixed an issue with typing small numbers starting with “.0″ in the numeric text box controls
• Fixed a couple of bugs in the axis arrangement code
• Fixed a visual bug when rendering a stacked bar chart with only 1 data point
• Fixed a bug in the generic PercentageTextBox style
• Fixed a bug in the FocusChangedBehavior feature of the numeric text box
• Minor perf improvements for charting

Silverlight Elements

• The RichTextEditor now includes text formatting when copying and pasting text within the editor

Web Workbench

• Misc perf improvements when dealing with larger files/large includes to improve reponsiveness of syntax highlighting and intellisense
• Support general sibling syntax for selectors
• Support comma’s at the end of a selector name including in conjunction with combinators
• Save combined non-minified js as .combined.js alongside minified version (pro)

LightSpeed

• Fix for CTI where dependent chains could be ordered before the parent when using EnableCandidateFixes ordering

As usual the free editions of the nightly builds are available right now from the downloads page, and the full editions from the store.

WPF Elements

• Fixed a bug in the logical-to-physical conversion method for bar charts.
• Added ChartAxis.LabelSpacing property to set the logical spacing between axis labels to be different than tick mark spacing
• Added TickMarkOffset and LabelOffset for fine adjustments of the tick mark and label positioning
• Fixed a bug in category axis support
• Fixed a bug in the tickmark/grid lines recycling
• ChartAxis.Placement property lets developers specify if each individual Y axis gets placed on the right or left side of the chart
• Fixed the alternate Y axis pixel alignment bug
• Fixed a bug where alternate Y axis titles were not being displayed

Silverlight Elements

• Can now choose between US and UK dictionaries for the RichTextEditor spell checker
• Added an option to the RichTextEditor to change the html color encoding between rgb and hexadecimal format
• RichTextEditor includes html parsing for hexadecimal color format

LightSpeed

• Make BindModel virtual to allow access for derived classes
• Make all appropriate methods virtual on Migration
• Add Enlisted event to Entity which is fired when SaveChanges is enumerating entities for unloading

As usual the free editions of the nightly builds are available right now from the downloads page, and the full editions from the store.

LightSpeed

• Updated SQLite provider to 1.0.80
• Fix for cascade delete across a STI hierarchy where the cascade enters the hierarchy in a derived class and we were trying to proceed through an association declared in a sibling class

Web Workbench

• Added JSHint support
• Fixed syntax highlighting for identifiers starting with an underscore
• Fixed incorrect ‘less than or equal to’ operator in Less mixin guards
• Added highlighting support for inline data URLs
• Fixed highlighting when using a comparison expression was used as a function argument
• Fixed highlighting of interpolated variables in URLs
• Fixed highlighting when a function call contained arguments that were spaced lists, and a nonfinal element of such a list was another function call
• Switched Sass compiler from IronRuby to ‘proper’ Ruby

WPF Diagrams

• Fixed a bug with connection point positions in a rotated nested node
• Added sample of removing a groupable node from its parent

WPF Elements

• Fixed a couple of issues when changing DataGrid.ItemsSource from null to a collection instance
• Fixed a hit testing issue with DataGrid cells
• Fixed an issue when a DataGrid contains a mix of star-sizing and absolute-sizing columns
• DataGrid DisplayMemberBinding now supports UpdateSourceTrigger of LostFocus
• Fixed a validation bug in DisplayMemberBinding
• Fixed the TrackingElement sample to support duplicate values
• Fixed an error if a chart XBinding or YBinding was set to a nonexistent property

Silverlight Elements

• First drop of spell checking for the HTML rich text editor
• Ctrl+Left and Ctrl+Right in the HTML editor now respect symbols
• Fixed a bug in ContextMenu where if it was forced closed due to the browser window being resized, it would never open again

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

WPF Elements

• Big charting performance improvements. We’ll have more to say about this in a future post. Ho yes.
• Fixed a chart zooming bug when using non-primitive numeric types
• Fix for bug in .NET 4.0 TextBox when used in a numeric DataGrid column
• Fixed potential crash if axis properties were updated in an unexpected order
  Added a Tag property to DataGridColumn
• Added a DisplayMemberBinding property to DataGridColumn. This simplifies creating complex bindings for a column without needing to create a custom template.

LightSpeed

• You can now have multiple QueryFilterAttributes on a class, allowing you to build filters compositionally even in the absence of characterising interfaces.
• Table names are no longer Pascalised if you have a design-time naming strategy and set UseClrNamingConventions to false
• Added IOverrideClrConventions extension to IDesignTimeNamingStrategy to override default singularisation behaviour
• Design-time assemblies with partial paths are now checked from the model directory as well as the current directory. This facilitates deployment of design-time assemblies via source control as part of the project.
• Fix for error when performing a cast in LINQ Sum() or other aggregate operators but specifying the column in the Select()
• Fixed projections into DateTime and nullable values when using query objects rather than LINQ

Web Workbench

• Added option to default the “compile” setting to false
• Added ‘stop on first error’ option for when a changed file has a lot of dependencies
• Fixes for non-ANSI characters in Sass

Silverlight Elements

• Added initial tab-indent support to HTML editor. Set CanHandleTabKey to enable this, and TabSize to customise the number of pixels that a tab indents by.

The latest nightlies are always available on the Downloads page (free editions) and in the Store (full editions).

LightSpeed

• Added a per-query IncludeFiltered flag to turn off implicit filtering (similar to IncludeDeleted)
• Added core support for SQL Server 2008 hierarchyid type
• Fixed an issue with aliasing when issuing a composed query with paging on SQL Server
• The designer now creates field name constants for special fields
• Fix for implicit filters not being applied in join clauses

WPF Elements

• Data grid star sizing improvements: support for a zero fill weight, new GridLength converter, fix for having to explicitly specify a weight
• Fixed a bug in data grid column virtualisation
• Improved pixel precision of MarkedStripeGrid
• Added Orientation property to MarkedStripeGrid
• Performance improvements for common charting data types

Silverlight Elements

• You can now customise the list of fonts in the HTML editor toolbar
• New properties on ScheduleFormatter for changing the content of most buttons
• We’ve brought over some improvements from WPF Elements to facilitate building multi-schedulers in Silverlight

WPF Diagrams

• Fix for editing node styles in Expression Blend

Web Workbench

• Chirpy compatibility fix
• Fix for Less syntax highlighting when specifying “…” as mixin arguments
• Updated CoffeeScript compiler to 1.3.1
• Added Iced CoffeeScript support

Now you can specify additional fonts that the user can use as long as they are installed on the users machine. Below you can see I have set the list to contain most of the default fonts along with Gigi, Jokerman, Magneto, Quartz MS and the Precursor Alphabet from the Jak and Daxter video game which I happened to have installed.

To specify the list of fonts available to the user, all you need to do is set the FontFamilies property on the StandardRichTextEditorToolBar. Here is the code I used to create the above screenshot.

IList<FontFamily> fontFamilies = new List<string>
{
    "Arial",
    "Calibri",
    "Cambria",
    "Candara",
    "Consolas",
    "Corbel",
    "Courier New",
    "Georgia",
    "Gigi",
    "Jokerman",
    "Lucida Sans Unicode",
    "Magneto",
    "Precursor Alphabet",
    "Quartz MS",
    "Segoe UI",
    "Times New Roman",
    "Trebuchet MS",
}.Select(s => new FontFamily(s)).ToList<FontFamily>();
 
ToolBar.FontFamilies = fontFamilies;

This property is available right now through the current nightly builds which you can download here if you have the trial version, or go to your account page if you are already a customer. If you have any questions or feature requests regarding the Silverlight HTML Editor, we’d love to hear from you in the forum!

For those of you who haven’t seen this control before, here is a brief run down about the rich formatting features that this control supports. Rich formatting includes bold, italic, underline, foreground color, background color, font-family and font size. Rich formatting can be applied or removed by selecting text and using the appropriate control in the toolbar. Adding, editing and removing hyperlinks can be done using the buttons with the familiar chain link icon. When pressing the hyperlink button, users will be presented with a dialog for inputting the url.

The text alignment of individual paragraphs can be set as either left, center, right or justify aligned. Users can add new paragraphs by pressing the Enter key. Line breaks can be added using the Shift+Enter keys. And finally, there is support for adding ordered and unordered lists. Unordered list items can be decorated with either square, round or disc bullets. Ordered lists support some of the common html list style types including decimals, leading zeros, alphabet characters and Roman numerals in both lower and upper case.

The control includes API for exporting the rich text as HTML, and also importing HTML to be displayed as the equivalent rich text. And of course there are many of the features that you would expect in any text editor such as Cut, Copy, Paste, Mouse selection and keyboard navigation including Home, End, Ctrl+Home, Shift+Up etc.

Improvements and new features
As mentioned before we have fixed many bugs and greatly improved the performance of this control. One of the first new features you may notice is the support for justify alignment. Justify alignment puts extra spacing between words so that each line evenly fills to the right edge of the editor. This is demonstrated in the image below The rich text editor now has scroll bars built into the default style. So if you have used this control before, you will no longer need to put the text editor into a scroll viewer.

API changes
Unfortunately in order to improve this control some API changes were made. Most of the methods on the control itself have now been moved to the RichDocument class. The current RichDocument for the control can be obtained through the RichTextEditor.Document property. The properties and methods related to html export and import have not changed. If you are having trouble finding a method that you used to use, let us know in our forum and we’ll help you out.

How to use it
There are 2 controls involved in adding the html editor in your applications. First off is the RichTextEditor. This manages all the rich text rendering and text input. Then there is the StandardRichTextEditorToolBar which provides the rich formatting UI controls. A typical way to set up these controls is shown in the following code example:

<Grid>
  <Grid.RowDefinitions>
    <RowDefinition Height="Auto" />
    <RowDefinition Height="*" />
  </Grid.RowDefinitions>
  <ms:StandardRichTextEditorToolBar Editor="{Binding ElementName=TextEditor}" />
  <ms:RichTextEditor x:Name="TextEditor" Grid.Row="1" />
</Grid>

The important thing to note here is setting the Editor property of the StandardRichTextEditorToolBar. This allows the tool bar to hook into the editor and apply formatting to the selected text. Exporting and importing HTML is as simple as reading the Html property or calling the LoadHtml method on the RichTextEditor control respectively.

Take it for a spin
The great news is that the new and improved HTML editor control is available right now! Head over to the downloads page to get the latest nightly build of the trial version, or visit your account page if you’re already a customer. Got any questions or feature requests for the HTML editor? We’d love to hear from you in the forum.

LightSpeed

• The designer now defaults computed columns (and identity columns if they’re not the ID) to Load Only. This is currently implemented for SQL Server only — let us know if you’d like it for other databases. We also no longer infer validations on computed columns.
• Fixed an error if you used an inheritance-based mocking framework to mock entities with associations
• Fix for error updating database from designer after changing the maximum length of a string property on a concrete table inheritance base class

Silverlight Elements

• New version of the RichTextEditor control. Better. Faster. Swooshier.

WPF Elements

• Data grid performance improvements
• Data grid hierarchical display
• Fixed an issue with using a BindingList as a DataGrid items source
• DataGrid now has a SelectedData property
• Fix for DataGrid keyboard navigation in RowAndCell mode
• DataGrid now has built-in support for user adding rows

Web Workbench

• JavaScript and CSS ‘mash and minify’ support
• Fix for not handling Less escaped (~) literals when they used single instead of double quotes
• Fix for misaligned CoffeeScript comment highlighting if file contained Unix line breaks
• Fixed handling of underscored in unquoted URLs. Unquoted URLs! Forsooth!
• Solution Explorer icons! I can barely wait to see how this looks in Visual Wasteland Studio 11.

As ever, nightly builds of free editions are available from the downloads page, and of full editions from the store.