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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!

Nightly news, 20 May 2011

Lots of updates in the nightly builds this week, so let’s cut to the chase.

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!

Nightly news, 13 May 2011

Another week, another pile of documentation to write! Fortunately, the code mills are still grinding away, bringing you another week’s worth of features and fixes through the nightly builds.

WPF Diagrams

• Force based layout algorithm now supports layout algorithm info
• Fix for cursor visuals sometimes misaligning to the grid when zoomed in
• Improved integration with the Visual Studio designer property grid
• Changing the Zoom property programmatically or through binding now zooms around the centre of the viewport
• We’ve added some shiny new demos. Very snazzy. Check them out.

LightSpeed

• Filtering a view no longer causes Visual Studio to think the diagram file has changed
• Improved logging of code generation exceptions for the benefit of those people who go round deleting their templates. No names, no pack drill
• Fix for an issue with Distinct().Count() when counting a projected member of a joined table
• Added support for traversing associations via a through

Phone Elements

• Smallest and largest data point now always displayed even when sampling charts with very large numbers of points
• Fixed an issue where the legend item template was not applied when adding a data series to a chart in code rather than XAML
• “Tiny bug fixes.” Hey, that’s what it says. (My favourite commit comment this week, though, just says “?” but I think that’s just a Victor Hugo tribute.)

WPF Elements

• Fixed an error when adding a data series to a chart in code rather than XAML
• Added ChartAxis.TitleVisibility property
• Improved handling of ChartAxis.LabelLevelCount for zooming and panning
• Added ChartAxis.LabelStep property
• Added support for displaying a single point of data when ActualMinimum equals ActualMaximum
• Minor stripiness tweak to ChartGrid
• Fixed a FormatException in ChartAxis
• The “tiny bug fixes” from Phone Elements

Silverlight Elements

• Fixed an error when adding a data series to a chart in code rather than XAML
• Fixed an issue where the legend item template was not applied when adding a data series to a chart in code rather than XAML
• Added ChartAxis.TitleVisibility property
• Fixed a FormatException in ChartAxis
• DataSeries.Visibility can now be used to collapse individual series on a chart
• Let’s hear it one more time for the “tiny bug fixes”

Free editions of nightly builds are available from the downloads page, and retail editions from the store.

Nightly news, 15 April 2011

Another week, another outbreak of people hoping to achieve something by changing their Twitter avatars*. Come on people, at least write to the lead singer of Echo and the Bunnymen. Or better yet, check out all the exciting stuff in the latest Mindscape nightly builds.

Silverlight Elements

• Awesome polar charting goodness! Check it out!

Phone Elements

• LoopingListBox: the built-in ObjectDataSource now supports looping via the IsLooping option

WPF Diagramming

• Fixed the SelectedElementsChanged event being raised more often than was necessary or even useful

LightSpeed

• Added support for customising the validation message when a non-nullable association is missing
• Oracle NUMBER columns with large precisions (and no scale) are now modelled as longs instead of ints
• Fix for custom association resolvers when all foreign key fields were part of the primary key
• Fix for an aliasing issue when we had a Count after a long chain of traversals

So there you have it, long chain of traversals fans. Get them while they’re hot — free editions from the downloads page, full editions from the store.

* Cynical opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Mindscape Ltd or its directors, except when they totally do.

Introducing Silverlight Polar Charts

Over the last few weeks we have added a whole new range of charting support for our Silverlight Elements control suite. Silverlight Elements now includes the PolarChart control along with 12 different polar coordinate chart series. Each of these chart series are polar versions of the cartesian series that you will be familiar with from our Chart control.

Here is an example of the rose chart and stacked rose chart (Polar bar charts).

Hold on. What’s a polar chart?

For those who don’t know, a polar chart plots data based on an angle (theta) and a distance (rho) from the center of the chart. This creates a circular charting canvas as seen in all the images, rather than a rectangular canvas seen on an X-Y cartesian chart. The theta axis sweeps around 360 degrees, but the range of the axis can be between any 2 numbers. The data you plot on the chart will contain the logical theta and rho values. The axes will then calculate the actual angle and distance of the data points based on the axis ranges. Silverlight Elements provides a PolarPoint struct which is convenient for plotting data on a polar chart. Alternativly, you can use any custom data objects you want and then set the ThetaBinding and RhoBinding properties of a polar data series to specify which properties hold the data you want to plot.

Polar scatter chart:

What can I use this for?

Though polar charts are not as commonly used as cartesian charts, they bring a few more charting capabilities to your applications that cartesian charts do not support. In particular, polar charts are great for plotting data that is related to direction, or the 12 hours of a clock face. Radar charts are well known for comparing attributes of an object, for example, the speed, passenger limit, safty, comfort and populartity of different aircraft. And of course polar line charts are a must have for plotting mathematical polar equations. Here is an example of a radar chart comparing the attributes of a couple of character roles:

Polar chart grid

Just like the cartesian chart control, the polar chart control supports custom background and foreground elements. This is useful for adding grid lines or images behind the plotted data, and adding crosshairs and data tracking elements in the foreground. Silverlight elements comes with the PolarChartGrid which renders grid lines and stripe lines in the background based on the positions of the axis labels. various styling options allow you to change the color and dash array of the grid lines, and define what colors to use for the stripe lines if any. You can also specify whether to use circular or straight radial lines.

Mouse events

As the mouse is used over the charting canvas of the polar chart control, events will be raised that provide you with polar informtation about the mouse position. The polar mouse event args will let you know the logical theta and rho values of the mouse position against the polar axes. You will also get the actual angle and distance of the mouse pointer from the center of the chart, as well as the X and Y positions from the top left corner of the charting canvas. These values can be used for displaying accurate values to the user, or aid in creating custom foreground elements.

Customizing

Using the power of Silverlight, you can customize every part of the polar chart control however you like. Various properties make it easy to change the look of the chart title or the position and style of the legend and legend items. Each of the different polar coordinate series provide options for changing the style of the lines, areas and chart symbols that they display. By customizing the look of the polar chart control, you can achieve some very nice results to fit the unique style of you applications.

The polar chart control is available through the currently nightly builds of Silverlight Elements. You can grab the trial version here, or pick it up from the store if you’re a customer.

If you have any suggestions or want to see any of the polar charts in our WPF or Windows phone control suites, then let us know by leaving a comment on this blog, or come visit the forum.