Archive for the ‘WPF Elements’ category

Nightly news, 16 March 2012

Tagged as LightSpeed, NHibernate Designer, Nightly news, Web Workbench, WPF Elements

WPF Elements

Added DataSeries.IsShownInLegend property to allow series to be excluded from the legend
If a type is edited in the property grid through a type converter instead of a TypeEditor, the grid now shows subproperties if the type converter derives from ExpandableObjectConverter
Added support for IBindingList as a source for the DataGrid
Fixed a bug which made it difficult to display the SchedulerDialog when double-clicking an item
Added DataGridCellEditModeBehavior to specify how the user can cause a DataGrid cell to enter edit mode using the mouse
Added new RowAndCell data grid selection mode
Improvements to DataGrid keyboard navigation
Typing into a DataGrid cell now automatically puts it into edit mode

LightSpeed

If a user is editing an entity which is soft-deletable and uses optimistic concurrency checking, and another user deletes it, and the first user then saves their changes, we now raise an OptimisticConcurrencyException
Fix for issue where if you queried on a property of an associated entity and that entity was soft-deleted and you were using a naming strategy to map the soft delete column name, it would give you a null reference exception. Bet you didn’t see that one coming
Fixed an issue with JSON.NET serialisation
Added support for database-side timestamps

NHibernate Designer

Added support for creating through tables in the database when the many-to-many association is of List kind

Web Workbench

Added support for specifying ‘co-imported’ files in order to include their variables in completion lists and suppress unwanted wigglies from their variables and mixins (use a specially formatted //* ww-expect "filename" comment)
Updated Less compiler to 1.3
Added Less, Sass and CoffeeScript file templates for Web Site pseudo-projects
Improved support for partials naming convention – if you create a file whose name begins with an underscore, it will now default to not compiling (you can turn it back on using the Web Workbench Settings screen)

Nightly builds of free editions are available from the downloads page, and of full editions from the store. Enjoy!

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 15 March 2012

WPF Elements: Polar Charts 101

Tagged as WPF Elements

In WPF Elements, our suite of stunning controls for WPF, we have a whole range of different chart controls (In fact, they’re also in Silverlight Elements and Phone Elements!). One of the chart types that we provide are the polar charts. For those who don’t know, polar charts plot their data around a circular axis. Data points are made up of a ‘theta’ value that specifies the angle around the circular axis, and a ‘rho’ value which determines the distance from the data point to the center of the chart.

Here are some of the polar charts you can create with WPF Elements:

Here is how to add a polar chart to your application and populate it with data.

First make sure you add a reference to the Mindscape.WpfElements.dll to your project and include the xml namespace in the xaml of your application like this:

xmlns:ms="http://namespaces.mindscape.co.nz/wpf"

Next, you can add a PolarChart to the application and give it a series that will be used to render the data. An example of this is shown below:

<ms:PolarChart Margin="20">
   <ms:RadarSeries ItemsSource="{Binding}" />
</ms:PolarChart>

The PolarChart control manages the title, legend and axes. The RadarSeries is used to render the data in a particular way – that is, all the adjacent data points are connected with a line and the area enclosed within the data points are filled with a brush. WPF Elements comes with all sorts of polar series which render data in their own unique way. PolarScatterSeries simply displays a symbol at each data point. PolarLineSeries connects adjacent data points together with line segments and provides an option for the line to be closed in a loop or left open. RoseSeries is the polar equivalent of a cartesian bar series. There are also spline and stacked polar series available as well. You can add any combination of multiple polar series to a single PolarChart control, each of which manages its own items source.

The example above is binding the ItemsSource to the data context of the window which is a list of data. WPF Elements comes with the PolarPoint class which is the easiest way to populate a polar series with data. Simply specify the theta and rho values for each data point, and the series will know how to plot it on the charting area. You can also create your own data point model class and set the ThetaBinding and RhoBinding properties of the series to tell it which properties of your model objects to plot against which axis. Using WPF templating you can customize the look of your polar charts to change the colors of the series, provide custom data point symbols, template the title, axis, lagend and much more.

Download this simple demo to help get started with adding polar charts to your application. You’ll also want to grab the free 60 day trial of WPF Elements.

If you have any question or feature requests about polar charts or any of our other chart controls, then we’d love to hear from you in the forum.

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Posted by Jason on 15 March 2012

Nightly news, 9 March 2012

Tagged as LightSpeed, Nightly news, WPF Elements

LightSpeed

Fix for not updating the database with a one-to-one association if the entities involved already had a one-to-many association
When dragging a table onto the designer from SQL Server, keep field order the same as the column order in the database
Designer now allows comma-separated lists of prefixes in Strip Table Prefix and Strip Column Prefix
We now handle composite grouping keys where the anonymous type is nested due to joins in the surrounding expression
Fix for not being able to use an EntityHolder at the non-FK end of a custom-resolved association (this enables custom-resolved one-to-one associations but requires you to set the new TreatAsTarget flag at the non-FK end)
Fix for a cascade delete error in class table inheritance when using optimistic concurrency checking and the parent type is a non-CTI type and the child type is a derived type
Improved the exception message if the database returns NULL from a LINQ aggregate query (such as Sum) but the return type of the query is non-nullable (this is an issue for e.g. Sum queries on SQL Server when no rows match)

WPF Elements

The property grid now provides a basic ITypeDescriptorContext to TypeConverter.GetStandardValues in most circumstances.

All these fixes and enhancements are in the latest nightly builds — free editions from the downloads page, full editions from the store.

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 8 March 2012

Nightly news, 2 March 2012

Tagged as LightSpeed, Nightly news, Web Workbench, WPF Elements

A quick reminder that we’re sponsoring the Codemania conference at the end of the month. Tickets are running low so if you’re in New Zealand snap yours up quick!

LightSpeed

You can now install the designer into the VS11 beta. And boy does it look colourful compared to the rest of that dreary thing
Fix for KeyTable error with TableAttribute
Added support for ScaffoldColumnAttribute to dynamic data
Entity.AfterLoad is now called only after eager loads have been put in place
Fix for table ordering
Enabled adding reference columns to SQLite in Update Database and migrations
Allow RemovalBehaviorAction.NoActionNoCheck on one-way associations

WPF Elements

Fixed a positioning bug with rotated axis labels
Fixed incorrect handling of the Background property in the vanilla SplitButton style
Improved handling of null and Double.NaN values in a line chart
Added a ChartAxis.RangeChanged event
Data point labels no longer get displayed if the data points are not in the viewport
Fixed an issue with building a ChartAxis in code
Fixed an issue with displaying minor tick marks
Fixed a visual glitch in Coverflow when reflections were turned off

Web Workbench

Fix for Format Document not being applied in @media blocks
Added support for specifying properties directly on a Sass namespace
Intellisense completion lists now include variables from imported files
You can now set up a Compass path to get rid of spurious ‘unknown mixin’ and ‘file not found’ squigglies on Compass imports
Fixed an issue where dependencies of a partial with an underscore prefix were not rebuilt if they imported the partial without the underscore
Fix for ‘bad file descriptor’ error with Sass @warn directive
We will now always create a .min.x file if minification is turned on, so that you don’t get the .min file removed from the project just because of an interim compilation error
Fix for the CoffeeScript minifier using the local decimal separator instead of invariant

Internal Systems

Scrubs no longer get no love from JD

Nightly builds of free editions are available from the downloads page, full editions from the store.

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 1 March 2012

Nightly news, 24 Feburary 2012

Tagged as LightSpeed, NHibernate Designer, Nightly news, Web Workbench, WPF Elements

LightSpeed

Subqueries now support projections
Subqueries now permit equality comparisons against fields in the outer query
Candidate fix for insert ordering issues in class table inheritance (activated by compatibility flag)

Web Workbench

Initial support for autocompletion of CSS property values
Fix for spurious syntax error if a variable interpolation occurred at the beginning of a selector
Added support for lists in mixin arguments
Basic version of collapsible outlining for CoffeeScript
Fix for dependent .scss or .less files not being recompiled if they lived in different directories from the file that had changed
Fix for @page directives

NHibernate Designer