In our past releases, getting started with Intersoft Premier Studio was quite inconvenience and tedious. With tons of shortcuts to choose from, you can be easily confused where to start from. In this release, we think hard on what’s the best possible scenario for users to get started quickly with our products. At the end, we came to a conclusion: samples.

Samples provide a hands-on experience for developers as well as practical code for implementing the desired features to their applications. We’ve made it super easy for you to run the samples and opening the sample solution in Visual Studio, all right from a single web interface.

Introducing the New Get Started Experience

When you install Premier Studio, you’ll get the following dialog box.

When you click Finish with the checkbox ticked, a new browser will be opened, this will lead you to a landing page that will help you get started with our products (assuming that you have a working internet connection).

Simply select one of the products you would like to get started with, you will be immediately presented with the available samples designed in stunning card view interface. Then hover on the samples you’re interested in to perform an action.

Note that the Get Started experience works only on Windows with Premier Studio (2016 and above) properly installed.

Getting Started with WebUI

Nothing explains better than a video. Here’s a 1-minute video experience on how to get started with WebUI through the new Get Started experience.

The samples for WebUI is categorized according to its respective controls, so you can quickly jump to the controls you’re interested in.

When you hover on a sample, you’ll get the following experience.

When you click on Open Solution, a new Visual Studio instance that contains the sample will be automatically opened. When you click on Run Sample, a locally-running sample for that particular sample will be launched. Clicking on Learn More takes you to the WebGrid documentation.

Getting Started with Crosslight

And here’s a minute-and-a-half video that shows the Get Started experience with Crosslight.

The samples for Crosslight are categorized as follows:

• Basic Samples: These are the basic and recommended samples if you’re just starting out with Crosslight. It contains the basic fundamentals of Crosslight development, such as MVVM pattern, data binding, display data list, perform CRUD operation, and more.
• App Samples: These samples showcases small, working apps made with Crosslight.
• UI Samples: These samples showcases various UI components available in Crosslight, such as Crosslight Charting, Crosslight Material Design, Crosslight Signature Pad, Crosslight Maps, Crosslight View Slider and more.
• Services Samples: These samples demonstrates how you can work with Crosslight services which are built-in to the Crosslight ViewModel and other library extensions as well. For example, performing calls, scanning barcode, sending emails, sharing content to social media and more.
• Data Samples: These samples shows you how to work with data-related operations with the built-in repositories and how they work together in harmony with the open-source Crosslight App Framework.

When you hover on an item, you’ll be presented with the following.

When you click on Download, you’ll immediately get a zip file that is immediately runnable using Xamarin Studio or Visual Studio (works on either Mac or Windows). If you click on Learn More, you’ll be taken to the respective sample page in the Developer Center.

Getting Started with ClientUI

Last but not least, here’s another minute-and-a-half video that shows the Get Started experience with ClientUI.

The samples for ClientUI are categorized as follows.

The categorization follows the previous categories available in the ClientUI Live Samples. When hovering to an item, you’ll be presented with the following experience.

If the sample has a WPF counterpart, then an additional combo box will be displayed for WPF, as well as the Run Sample option. If the WPF counterpart is not available, then the combo box will not appear. When clicking on the Open Solution, then the Silverlight solution will be opened. Similarly, clicking on Run Sample will run the Silverlight sample locally on your computer.

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed the new Getting Started experience available in this new release. Should you have any feedback with the Getting Started experience, feel free to initiate a chat with us, and we’ll be more than happy to assist you for the best on-boarding experience.

Till next post,
Nicholas Lie

The wait is over! Premier Studio 2016 is here, our biggest and most revolutionary release since Intersoft was established. Our team worked very hard to ensure the best quality of the products delivered in this release. A big thanks to you all for your continuous support and feedback to make this great release a reality.

This latest release brings major upgrades to all our toolset across 5 platforms, including ASP​.​NET, Silverlight, WPF, iOS, and Android. It reflects on our continuous commitment to create the most innovative and forward-thinking toolset that dramatically improve productivity and shorten development time. We’re very excited to have something new for everyone!

We started out by revamping our entire product lineups starting with WebUI, which includes 40+ web components, with Unified Theming support. The new feature now uses advanced SCSS in combination with Node SASS and Web Compiler to achieve a modern, unified look and feel across the lineup. It’s the best of both worlds: industry’s most advanced web components with beautiful and gorgeous design combined into a single, complete package. More importantly, all WebUI lineups have been reengineered with the latest and greatest web technologies, so you can expect responsive design and full support for latest major browsers like IE11, Edge, Safari 9, Chrome 48, Firefox 44.

Next, the most anticipated improvement for Crosslight is here. Fully embracing Material Design, building gorgeous Material apps is no longer a chore. The new v7 library introduced in this release was built from the ground up, taking account the user experience and interaction covered in the new Material Design. With the new library and simplified APIs, you can now easily add Material Design elements and interactions such as Floating Action Buttons, Collapsing Toolbars with expand/collapse behaviors, parallax scrolling, Material Navigation Drawer, and so much more.

Another important milestone in this release, we’ve smoothened out the development experience by fully embracing NuGet package manager as the main delivery channel for future Crosslight builds, so you don’t have to worry about tedious packages references to ensure your Crosslight solution and samples work properly.

Introducing the new ClientUI Reporting for WPF, now you can easily author and build gorgeous enterprise reports from the convenience of your desktop. Fully optimized and fine-tuned for WPF, ClientUI Reporting for WPF ensures that your existing ClientUI reports will continue to work as it is, whether it’s on the desktop or on the web.

Visualizing your data in your reports? We have something special in store for you. In this release, new charting support with over more than 20+ types of charts are now available in ClientUI Reporting, for both WPF and Silverlight platforms. Whether it’s doughnut, pie, line, bar, columns, anything. We’ve got it all covered. This new addition is sign of our enduring commitment towards ClientUI and continues to strengthen ClientUI’s position as the best toolset for enterprise development on Silverlight and WPF platforms.

Download Now

To begin enjoying this new release, simply sign-in to your account to download the latest release, or request a trial here.

While waiting for downloads, please follow the links below to learn more what’s new in this latest release:

• Press Release — an official overview of the release
• 2016 Tour — a comprehensive details of each new component and new feature introduced in this release

In addition to product bits, we’ve moved forward to a better direction which greatly enhance and simplify installation experience. The first thing you notice when downloading the new installer is its absolutely small size, 480MB, which is about half the size of previous installer. It’s made possible as we no longer ship offline documentation since we’re completely transitioning to agile workflow for all products (including WebUI and ClientUI now). This direction allows all our documentation to be updated online, whenever new features are added, instead of waiting for the next installer update. As the result, Intersoft Developer Center has been significantly updated to cover new documentation for all the three platforms. You can start exploring here.

Finally, we hope you enjoy our latest release as much as we love building it. We look forward to see what you will build next!

Note: New licenses will be sent out to all active subscribers in 24 hours after this announcement. You’ll receive a notification email when your account is updated.

All the best,
Jimmy

In this first post of the year, I’d like to share something fresh and exciting for all of you. As you might have aware, we’ve been working hard on a big release since the past few months. It’s in deed our biggest release yet so far — with major upgrades to all flagship products across all 7 platforms which include WebUI, ClientUI, and obviously, Crosslight. So what does that mean to you, and what you can expect in the upcoming release? Read on.

Whether you have a Premier subscription, or individual platform subscription, you’re getting the most out of your investment, and more importantly, get ready to kick off the new year with new goodies we’ve prepared for you.

As we’re reaching the RTM milestone, most of the product bits are ready. That said, here are some latest previews, fresh from the kitchen.

A Whole New Level of Crosslight Development Experience

Crosslight developers, rejoice! Gone are the days of assembly references nightmare. In the new release, we’re strongly focused in creating a better development experience in addition to new tools and features. Our goal is to make getting started with Crosslight as easy as 1-2-3, where you can start from a blank Xamarin project or downloading a Crosslight sample, add Crosslight package, and start writing some code.

To make that happen, we’ve created over 60 NuGet packages that you can consume with a simple click. We designed our packages to be atomic which align with the Crosslight nature: highly extensible and modular.

Unlike typical packages, Crosslight NuGet packages are designed for cross-platform targeting, allowing you to simply add a single package which automatically install to multiple projects in the solutions, including Core, iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Windows 8 projects. In addition, we also made available special packages for Xamarin Support and Google Play Services which have been strongly signed. The end result is clear, a much streamlined, hassle-free development experience.

More importantly, Crosslight’s packages implemented auto dependencies which greatly improve developer experince. Let’s say you want to add logging with Azure integration, you just need to add the Crosslight Logging Azure Insights package. It automatically adds required dependencies such as Crosslight Logging and Azure Service packages to all client and server projects.

This makes building cross-platform apps with Crosslight ultimately simple and easy. Not to mention you can now perform updates in a single click as new Crosslight updates are available. No more frustrating, error-prone manual updates.

But wait, does it work in Xamarin Studio on the Mac? Yep, absolutely. The entire goal of adopting NuGet is due to cross-platform nature of Crosslight where developers typically work with the project across different operating systems and IDEs. Using NuGet is the perfect strategy for such cross-platform development since all references are stored locally in each solution folder.

To make NuGet works the way we desire, we shipped a special package manager console add-in for Xamarin Studio. This allows you to simply type a command, and have the specified package added to all projects in the solution.

Here’s an example result of a Crosslight solution with NuGet in Xamarin Studio.

Note that although Crosslight 5 pre-release packages have been made available to NuGet for a while, they are published particularly for testing purpose. The latest submission is a near-final build which is feature-complete and stable. Surely you can give it an early look, although we recommend you to wait for a little while, at least until we released the accompanying samples next week.

Introducing Crosslight Android Material

Crosslight Android Material is arguably the most anticipated features in Crosslight 5. The new release ships thousands of new features and resolved backlogs. But what excites me the most in this release is the all-new, shiny Crosslight for Android Material, which is a result of many months of intensive engineering and meticulous UX design.

We’ve made it super easy for you to create beautiful Android Material experience. It’s all started with the new Crosslight Fragment component which provides a wealth of APIs and built-in features. Let’s take a quick look at the Material version of our popular Inventory sample.

Unlike the native Android development, creating Material experience with Crosslight is simple yet elegant. Here are some code snippets to give you some ideas how Crosslight Material APIs look like.

Want to add bar items? It’s easy.

protected override void Initialize()
{
    base.Initialize();

    this.AddBarItem(new BarItem("SaveButton", CommandItemType.Save) { ShowAsAction = ShowAsAction.Always });
    this.AddBarItem(new BarItem("CancelButton", CommandItemType.Cancel) { ShowAsAction = ShowAsAction.Always });
}

Adding a floating action button? Just a single API to call.

protected override void Initialize()
{
    base.Initialize();

    this.FloatingActionButtons.Add(new FloatingActionButton("EditItem")
    {
        Position = FloatingActionButtonPosition.BottomRight,
        IconId = Resource.Drawable.edit,
        Direction = FloatingActionButtonDirection.Up,
        HideOnScrollUp = true
    });
}

Presenting a parallax image with collapsible toolbar? Piece of cake.

protected override void Initialize()
{
    base.Initialize();

    this.ToolbarSettings.Mode = ToolbarMode.Collapsing;
    this.ToolbarSettings.CollapsingToolbarSettings.EnableParallaxImage = true;
    this.ToolbarSettings.CollapsingToolbarSettings.ExpandedHeight = 240;
}

iOS-style swipe-to-action? That’s built-in.

protected override void Initialize()
{
    base.Initialize();

    this.EditActions.Add(new EditAction("Sold"));
    this.EditActions.Add(new EditAction("Delete", true));
}

The result of the edit actions can be seen below.

As seen in several examples above, we’ve redesigned the entire Android development experience so you can define behaviors and features with simple API, minimizing the needs on AXML layout. That saves countless of hours, we’ve experienced that ourselves.

The Crosslight Android Material ships with 50+ components exclusively engineered for Material user experience. This includes a brand-new navigation view, card view, recycle view, collection view, and iOS-style split view complete with editing mode, multiple selection and all data-related functionality you would expect.

The following image shows the all-powerful SplitViewFragment.

To let you quickly learn and explore the new Crosslight for Android Material, we’re re-creating over 40 Crosslight samples to support the latest platforms and best practices. All Crosslight samples are also NuGet-enabled now, so you can now get started by simply downloading them and restore the packages. We’ll be publishing out these new samples ahead of the release so you can give it a try early. Stay tuned for our next announcement.

Big WebUI Revolution.

It’s unlike any WebUI you’ve seen before. All 40+ WebUI components are redesigned from the ground-up to leverage the latest technologies and trends in web development. In the previous post, Nicholas has shown you a preview of the upcoming WebUI redesign. But that’s only a fraction of what we’re working on. We introduced hundreds of new styles which are meticulousy designed for every component, every feature, and every little interaction detail.

In this post, I’m thrilled to show you WebGrid Enterprise 10, with its all-new, wonderful user interface design. It marries the best of both worlds — the most advanced data grid functionality and a modern user interface. Here’s how WebGrid 10 looks like at a glance.

The new WebGrid theme is designed to be timeless, incorporating SVG for all icons and glyphs, allowing your WebUI apps to look great in any screen display, from standard resolutions to iMac 5K display. To make that dream a reality, our designers have been busy creating some 500+ icons exclusively designed for WebUI, then engineered to perfection with our latest Unified Theming framework.

The redesign for hierarchical and batch update UI have been one of the most challenging tasks as they are unique features in WebGrid. You won’t find any design references on jQuery or Bootstrap-based grids which are mostly a plain table. So we invented one for you.

Pivot chart, one of the flagship features in WebGrid, has been completely redesigned along with the ribbon, pivot area, drag-drop interaction, data filter experience and more.

And even to every little details, such as sort indicator, filter elements, and context menu. Everything is new in WebGrid 10.

How about other WebUI components? Definitely you won’t be able to build a full-fledged web app with only a single WebGrid component. We’ve a lot of new and interesting UI goodies to offer. For instance, WebPaneManager now allows you to create various modern layout such as those found in Apple Mail app, OneDrive, or iCloud. The entire lineup of WebDesktop, WebEssentials, and WebScheduler are joining force this big WebUI revolution.

We can’t wait to deliver these exciting major WebUI release to you soon. Stay tuned for our next announcement when our new demo is published.

Stunning Charts for Enterprise Reporting.

As if it weren’t enough, the 2016 release also ships a major upgrade to ClientUI, the enterprise developer’s choice of toolset. We’re strongly focused in creating new features that make enterprise desktop apps development even easier.

You can now add professional-looking charts right in your reports. It works the way you expect it to be — drag the chart to the designer surface, bind it to a data source, and choose a chart type from the intuitive Chart Designer. Voila! Here you go.

The following images show the chart designer and the report viewer respectively.

We offer dozens of chart types commonly used in financial and enterprise reports, including bar, column, pie, doughnut, bubble, scatter, range and much more.

That’s not all. The new chart feature will be also available and fully supported in WPF platform. In the previous release, the reporting suite are only partially available in WPF. And starting in this release, we’re pleased to announce that all ClientUI components and features in Silverlight have been made available in WPF. Our WPF team has been working hard to optimize every control and features so they run with best performance and flawlessly in WPF as well as in the latest Windows 10 release.

And as a bonus, ClientUI 12 will include a report conversion tool for Crystal Report files. So if you’re tasked to migrate a bunch of CR reports, you’ll love this small yet time-saving tool.

Coming Soon

Premier Studio 2016 is slated for a public release on mid February 2016. Our team is currently making final touch to the products and preparing an even better development experience to everyone. Last but not least, we’re also working on a new series of getting started guide and improvements to over hundreds of documentation pages.

Last but not least, we’re giving out a free 3 month extension for all expiring subscriptions between Nov 2015 and Jan 2016. We’d love to have you joining us to celebrate our biggest release yet.

At the meantime, we want to hear from you what new tools/features in the upcoming release that you anticipated the most. We’ll also welcome any feedback!

Best,
Jimmy