What's new in WPF Elements 5

WPF Elements 5 is a massive update to the collection and ships with a wide range of new controls, improvements, bug fixes and performance enhancements. This page lists the major changes; hundreds more are contained within.

Data Grid

WPF Elements 5 debuts the super fast Datagrid control. With its highly tuned virtualization core the Datagrid can display millions of entries while remaining highly responsive. Full support for standard WPF data binding is available, as well as extensive support for styling and custom editors. A rich set of options are available for customization including sorting, frozen columns, paging controls and much more.

Time Explorer

The new Time Explorer control makes it easy to select a date range relative to plotted data. A range can be selected by dragging the mouse, or using the scroll bars. The explorer can be zoomed using the mouse wheel. Any cartesian chart can easily be embedded within the Time Explorer.

Autocomplete Editor improvements

The Autocomplete Editor box now allows multiple entries to be entered while repeatedly displaying the suggestion drop-down box. Entries can be separated with whitespace or commas.

Theme updates

Dozens of fixes and improvements have been applied to all five included themes which are now offered free of charge, so make sure you check them out.

All new color pickers

WPF Elements 5 includes several great new ways to select colors, and dozens of palettes to select them from. Menu items can be added (for instance buttons or popups) allowing your users fast access to related commands. The new HSV color picker can be embedded inside one of these, for instance.

New chart types - polar charts

Polar charts show data using radius and distance from a centre point, instead of X-Y coordinates. Polar line, polar scatter and polar bubble charts are supported, which allow data to be displayed in a striking way without implying sequence.

Performance tuning and bugfixes

Hundreds of small improvements have been made across all controls ensuring they perform lightning quick and remain highly stable. In particular the rendering of all charts and the Scheduler control has been significantly improved, and the built-in themes have been refactored resulting in further performance enhancements across all controls.

New in WPF Elements 4.1

Performance improvements

WPF Elements 5 benefits from all the performance tuning done across the Silverlight Elements and Phone Elements products. Bringing the performance required to run silky smooth controls on a resource constrainted device such as a cell phone up to our WPF product line means WPF Element 5 is blazingly fast!

New chart types - rose charts

Rose charts are the polar equivalent of bar charts. They're a striking way to present data sets where the elements are cyclical, such as monthly values, or where the order isn't important. WPF Elements can do normal rose charts or stacked rose charts (the latter shown here).

New chart types - radar charts

Radar charts are the polar equivalent of area charts. They're a great way for users to compare different aspects of data sets, for example to draw out the relative strengths and weaknesses of two products or plans. Overall WPF Elements 5 includes 12 polar chart types including polar line, polar scatter and polar spline series.

Charting improvement: step improvements

We've made a whole bunch of improvements to chart axes. For example, label frequency can differ from axis marker frequency to help deal with larger numbers of marker labels in an attractive way. This can be specified easily in the XAML mark up for any chart. Of course, if labels were to overlap the WPF Elements Charts will automatically skip labels by default to ensure charts are readable.

Charting improvement: title visibility improvements

Another nice simple axis enhancement is control over the axis title visibility. Easily configured in XAML or code.

Charting improvement: minimum range specification

Also on chart axes, you specify the minimum range a user can zoom into on a per-axis basis.