Coming up: Visual Studio 2012, Windows 8 and IE 10 Support

We started out the first WebUI Studio 2012 release with dozens of new enhancements and exciting features including full HTML5 doctype support in our flagship ASP.NET controls such as WebGrid and WebCombo. The 2012 R1 was released last month, you can check out the complete what’s new list here.

In this post, I wanted to share our plans for the upcoming WebUI Studio updates. In particular, we’re excited to be part of Visual Studio 2012 sim-ship partner. This means that we will release a WebUI Studio update within 30 days of the Visual Studio 2012 release.

Visual Studio 2012 Support

All WebUI Studio components will support Visual Studio 2012 when it arrives in the next few weeks. This includes the ASP.NET, Silverlight and WPF suite. All designer extensions for Visual Studio will be enhanced to support Visual Studio 2012, including the toolbox, Metro-style component designer and icons, as well as the prebuilt project templates and project wizards.

See the screen preview of the designer support below for the ASP.NET controls.

For Silverlight and WPF, most of the designer extensions such as adorners, context menu, and region services will continue to work in Visual Studio 2012. See the preview below.

Windows 8 and IE 10 Support

Earlier last month, Windows 8 has reached the Release Preview milestone which also includes a significant update to its Windows Internet Explorer browser. The IE 10 Release Preview includes great improvements to the parsing rules to make HTML5 “just work” in the same way across browsers. However, there are several implications and trade-off due to the improvements. One of the implications is the removal of legacy features, including the conditional comments, element behaviors and XML data islands.

The removal of XML data islands caused several breaking changes since it’s used extensively in our ASP.NET tools. The next update of WebUI Studio will address the XML parsing changes and include full support for IE 10 in both desktop and Metro mode. These changes will not require any efforts in the customer’s code.

The following screen preview shows WebGrid 8 running on the IE 10 Metro standards mode.

Best,
Jimmy