Today we are pleased to announce the release of WPF Elements 6.0. This version includes a huge load of improvements, features, bug fixes and a new control.
Ribbon control
The main new control in this version is the Ribbon control. A lot of users will be familiar with this control as the command hub that sits at the top of Microsoft Office applications. This control is a replacement for the Menu control and is used to categorize application commands and display them nicely to the user. Out of the box, this control supports a lot of WPF Controls including buttons, check boxes, comboboxes, numeric controls, split buttons and more. Based on the available screen real-estate, the Ribbon control will select a small, medium or large state for each control and arrange them in an optimal way. If there isn’t enough space, groups of controls will bubble down into expandable segments so the user still has access to everything.
Included with the Ribbon control is the Gallery control which is like a Ribbon-friendly list box. Items are displayed in horizontal rows and can be navigated through with smooth animations. The user can expand the whole list of items in a popup where items can be optionally categorized. Gallery controls can either be placed directly within the Ribbon control, or within the dropdown part of a split button.
A demo called “Text Formatter” is included with WPF Elements 6.0 which demonstrates all the features of the Ribbon control.
Improved DateTime axis support
Since version 1 of the Chart control, there has always been support for displaying DateTime values along the axes. The axes automatically space out the tick marks and labels which works well for numbers, but could be better for DateTime values. In WPF Elements 6.0 the axes logic for DateTime values is much improved. Labels will now be separated by proper time units rather than seemingly random intervals. For example, based on the current time range on the axis, the labels could be separated by 5 minutes, or 12 hours, or 2 days or 3 months etc. The interesting one here is monthly intervals because each month has a different number of days. The labels and tick mark spacings will be physically different to support this making the axis labels very easy to read.
Accurate data rendering.
The Chart control can handle millions of data points at once while maintaining good responsiveness. One of the ways it does this is by skipping over some of the data points so that only a few hundred points need to be rendered at once. As you zoom in, less points are skipped over so all the data can still be viewed. By default, the Chart control skips over of a constant number of data points per render. For example, the Chart may render every 10th point. This works well, but it can potentially skip extreme outlying data points and not capture an accurate shape of the data. In version 6.0 we include the IsMinMaxSamplingEnabled property on data series which when set to true will sacrifice a small amount of performance to render more accurate data. This is ideal for data that has sudden changes in the trend or outlying values. Here is a before and after shot of a trigonometry equation containing an extreme amount of spikes. For this kind of data there is a huge improvement with using this feature.
There are heaps of other additions that I’d love to tell you about but can’t fit into this blog post. For the full list, check out the Getting Started/What’s New page in the documentation that is shipped with the product. You can also see a simplified list of what’s new right here.
If you’re already a WPF Elements customer, you can upgrade to version 6.0 for free by going to your account page. If not, download the free 30 day trial to see what you’re missing out on. If you have any questions about WPF Elements, let us know in the forum. We’d also love to hear any feature requests you have.
LightSpeed
Web Workbench
WPF Diagrams
WPF Elements
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
WPF Diagrams
Silverlight Elements
As usual the free editions of the nightly builds are available right now from the downloads page, and the full editions from the store.
Web Workbench
LightSpeed
WPF Elements
Metro Elements
As usual the free editions of the nightly builds are available right now from the downloads page, and the full editions from the store.
Web Workbench
WPF Elements
WPF Diagrams
Metro Elements
As usual the free editions of the nightly builds are available right now from the downloads page, and the full editions from the store.
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