The arrival of Windows 8 adds more choices to the platform stack that mobile developers should consider. So my question is, do you plan to build Windows 8 apps, or perhaps you already built one? As we’re planning our roadmap ahead, we’d love to hear from you – which platforms will you build your next apps on, the challenges you’re facing, and what tools you need to get your jobs done right.

Join our 2013 product survey and place your vote so we can align our next product roadmap to your development needs.

Your participation is an effective way to present your thoughts and opinions about our products and service to the management of Intersoft Solutions. I do believe that your valuable feedback would be very useful to help us improve our products and services in the future.

If you have any questions or technical difficulties, please don’t hesitate to drop an email to me at martin@intersoftpt.com.

Thank you for your time and participation.

Regards,
Martin

The most significant updates are the support for Microsoft LightSwitch and event aggregator for advanced MVVM application development. It also updates DevForce to version 6.1.0 with native query support. ASP.NET also receives a huge list of update, especially in WebGrid, WebCombo, and WebInput.

Click here to read more about the announcement and download the release notes.

Customers with WebUI Studio 2011 R1 installed can obtain these updates from Update Manager. Looking for the the new setup? Registered customers and subscriber can login to dev2.intersoftpt.com to download a free copy. Others can obtain the full 30-day trial at intersoftpt.com/RequestTrial.

Happy developing guys. If you have any troubles, feel free to ask for help @ intersoftpt.com/Community.

Best regards,
Jemmy

Compared to the original roadmap, the 2010’s first volume release shipped 3x more controls than initially planned. This reflects our strong commitment in providing the most complete tools with the best quality possible for line-of-business application development. Our flagship ClientUI was the industry’s first development suite with comprehensive MVVM support, journal-aware navigation framework, and a solid architecture to support unified development model. To revisit the new 2010 highlights, please see the 2010 tour page.

While other vendors are still struggling in making their controls MVVM-compliant, we are already several milestones ahead with hundreds of MVVM resources and videos available. Since the release, approximately 66% of new sales came from developers who migrated from competing solutions. Interestingly, the majority of our new customers weren’t only attracted by the amazingly rich controls we offered in the suite, but also the overall framework and architecture that thoughtfully designed to provide a ubiquitous solution for rich client application development.

Bill Gower, the author of several Silverlight books, commented in our Facebook page:

“The other thing that I really appreciate and like is the thing that although Silverlight and WPF are very much alike and in future versions will probably be one product, right now there are some very real differences. Using the Intersoft controls makes those differences less obvious and truly gives the developer Silverlight and WPF with one set of code.”

Thanks Bill for your praise – I hope you loved ClientUI as much as we love building it.

Continuing the success and quality of the first 2010 release, we will be back with 40+ new gorgeous controls in the upcoming 2010’s second volume release. With our focus remains unchanged on the Silverlight and WPF strategy, the upcoming release will be strongly focused on presentation and data controls geared toward line-of-business development that take advantage of our unified development approach, commanding and MVVM-ready architecture.

In this blog post, I’m going to outline the next roadmap for this year’s second release, particularly on the Silverlight and WPF lineup.

New UXGridView

Yes, that’s right! A new, more powerful data grid is coming your way in the upcoming release. What is the problem with the current data presenter lineup and why do we need a new data grid, you might ask. The fact is there is nothing seriously wrong in the presenter – in fact we just see it having a different position from the data grid. Here is some background.

When we first introduced presenter lineup for the Silverlight back in 2008, the presenters were mainly designed to offer a richer interface with more innovative multiple view presentation concept. It is certainly impressive for the kind of applications tailored for consumers such as iTunes style music library application, or document management which require view-switching capability, but not quite for powerhouse data applications which require more traditional grid functions, say, the hierarchical layout feature, grouping with aggregates and column total to name a few.

You can say that it is a bit ironic as we are going back to the basics, yet this kind of functionality is one of the most requested from our customers and industry partners. The market demanded a versatile, more traditional data grid that is ideal for line-of-business applications. And that is what we are working to deliver!

Unlike other grids which still sit on the outdated Silverlight approach, the new UXGridView is engineered, from the ground up, to take advantage of the latest Silverlight and WPF features. The new grid will be entirely built upon the ClientUI Framework, so you can expect it to use the most cutting-edge design pattern which leverages commanding, MVVM and advanced data binding engine. Rest assured that it will be a perfect addition to the ClientUI family, as you can now bind everything together using MVVM along with the rich controls in the existing ClientUI lineup.

UXGridView will include most features you expected in a data grid – column moving, resizing, sorting, freezing and so on – plus an Outlook-style grouping, customizable editing controls and an advanced filtering dropdown. It also sports a nice, WebGrid style status bar where you can arrange and group most of the important commands in one place such as paging, refresh, and editing. The paging interface is interestingly a standalone control you can use to provide paging functionality to other controls as well such as list box, data form, or other items control – all using the same MVVM semantics and Silverlight’s new data binding concept.

While we have most functionality covered, how about the performance? Is it capable of handling large data source, a million rows perhaps? As we built the world’s best performing grids and schedulers, I should say that is not something to worry about. The recent lab tests, in the current development version, shows impressive results with our improved data virtualization architecture – it’s a sleek, highly responsive data grid, even when fed with millions of rows. Best of all, we retained all the grid features and customization aspects while achieving this new performance level, unlike competing solutions which trade-off certain features to workaround the performance.

All Things Input

As the heading suggested, the upcoming volume release will include a multitude of input controls, all geared toward line-of-business application scenarios. It will include any input controls you can imagine – masked text box, currency editor, date time editor, domain up down, numeric up down, rating, slider bar, memory-efficient file uploader, color picker, and date time picker with an innovative analog clock, and much more! All these new input controls will uniquely support MVVM and commanding, and implement ISO-standards for user experience and accessibility – innovations which set us apart.

As if the list weren’t enough, we are going to add few more heavyweight controls, for instance, an intuitive calendar with ultra smooth animation even when multi-month view is enabled! We will also ship a standalone busy indicator, and a new kind of tab control that lets you navigate to a XAML page instead of inline content – bet that’s something you wouldn’t find elsewhere.

Learn More

The WebUI Studio 2010 R2 is expected to arrive before Christmas this year, and yes, that means it’s just around a month to go. In summary, with 40 new controls added in the upcoming R2, this translates to an incredible 220 controls in total for the Silverlight and WPF lineup. Our team is hard at work to ensure you get the most out of your subscription investment with two major release cycle in a year. And with the second release scheduled next month, we will be back to our regular release cycle. Learn the top reasons to choose WebUI Studio here, and the benefits here.

Unfortunately, I cannot provide more details for the controls roadmap in this public blog post. To read the complete details, please logon to Developer Network and click on the product roadmap announcement in the Dashboard/Home window.

If you’re a prospective customer and wish to get a copy of our latest roadmap, please direct your email to sales@intersoftpt.com. We’ll send you a copy of NDA to be signed in order to receive the roadmap details.

As always, your feedback is valuable for us to drive our products development. If you have requests on a particular controls or features, please feel free to write us an email at feedback@intersoftpt.com.

Best,
Jimmy Petrus
Chief Software Architect

New release. New look.

If you’re using Internet Explorer browser with Silverlight installed, you’d have noticed the new desktop look of our Developer Network. Otherwise, I highly recommend you to download Silverlight 2 today and experience the difference of our Developer Network with Silverlight UX. We hope you liked our new, elegant theme paired with our exclusive ‘black glass’ dock style. See the following screenshot for a better picture.

New desktop look of Developer Network.

Changes in My Subscriptions

Allright, enough introduction. For existing subscribers, you would have noticed several new changes when you access the My Subscription application. You might be wondering why the changes were introduced, and how it could be useful to you. Let me explain below.

My Subscriptions interface now features two panels, instead of just a plain text in the previous version. The first top panel contains more detailed information about the subscription. You can quickly see the summary of your subscriptions and its status. If you have the developer manager role, you can now see all subscriptions that owned by your company (via the linked corporate ID).

As the 2009 release introduces three new editions of subscription, it’s now possible that you have multiple active subscriptions at a time. Unlike pre-2009 release which shows only a single subscription information, My Subscriptions interface is now improved to show all your subscriptions list in details — eg, you can see how many times a subscription has been renewed, when it’s going to expire, and more. See the screenshot of the enhanced Subscription interfaces below.

Enhanced Subscriptions interface to show multiple subscriptions in details.

Note that you can also expand on a subscription record to display the list of components included in that subscription, along with each component’s license key and version information.

Changes in My Components

My Components application also introduces a minor update on the Full Version tab. Instead of mixing up all products into a single tree view navigation, we now introduce a combobox selection above the product list interface.

The new combobox is essentially important as you can now have multiple different editions in a single account, and makes it easier for you to see what components belong to which subscription edition. If you have non subscription products in the account (eg, Suite, or individual products such as WebGrid, WebCombo, etc), you can find them in “Non Subscription Products” selection.

New combobox interface to select active subscription/product

Please note that the first subscription will be selected by default in the first page  load.

Changes in My Developers

My Developers application also receives a handful of changes primarily in the way how you assign a subscription to your team members. With the new enhancement in My Developers, we make it easy for you to assign multiple subscriptions for a team member regardless of the edition. Please note that the pre-2009 system limits only one subscription assignment for a member.

In the Assign Subscription tab, you’ll now see a list of assigned subscriptions. To assign a new subscription to a member, simply click on the new row, and choose a subscription from the dropdown list, then press tab. See the screenshot below.

My Developers now allows you to assign multiple subscriptions to a team member.

One-click Subscription Renewal

We’ve also added a small nice feature that takes your pain off for renewing multiple subscriptions. In the past, you have to add each subscription item for each renewal in our Online Store, then find your subscription ID, copy and paste the ID, and go through the remaining subscriptions. Eventhough you typically renew only once in a year, that’s still a truly tedious task IMO.

Thanks to the new feature in Developer Network 2009, you can now renew all your subscriptions in a single click away! Just head to My Subscriptions application, there you’ll see a list of expired (and about to expire) subscriptions grouped by edition. Then click on the edition link to renew all subscriptions for that edition. You’ll then be automatically redirected to our new Online Store with all subscriptions pre-filled. All you need to do is simply clicking on the checkout button — it’s that simple.

Renewing all your subscriptions is now as easy as a mouse click.

Last but not least, I hope you liked all the improvements we’ve done in Developer Network 2009 to deliver even better, more professional services to you. Enjoy and happy developing!

As usual, please leave your comment here for questions or feedback.

All the best,
Jimmy.

Team Calendar in WebFishEye navigation

Team Calendar Shortcut

In Team Calendar, you can schedule your events and see Intersoft events, which are indicated by Dark Steel color.

Intersoft event in Team Calendar

You will not be able to edit or delete Intersoft events; however you can freely add, edit, and delete your private events. Events that you add in Team Calendar will be private to yourself and will not be viewable to public. In the future, the Team Calendar will be enhanced to support shared scheduling between developers in the same corporate id.

Add private event in Team Calendar

You can also add your own resources and categories. The resources and categories that are you add will be private to your own view, so the other users will not be able to view it.

Add private resource in Team Calendar

Happy scheduling! As usual, feel free to drop a comment

Intersoft Solutions Live Chat is built on top of our own product, WebUI Studio.NET 2007 R2. Most of the request and response actions are managed by WebNotification and WebFlyPostBackManager.

When you send a live chat request, the request will be sent to the server using WebFlyPostBackManager where it waits for a support member to take the request. In the Support member’s TDN page, notifications (complete with sounds) about your request will be displayed. This way, they can still know the incoming requests even though they are busy in different browsers.

While waiting for the status, you will be redirected to the Live Chat Loading page. In the Loading page, requests will be sent to server to check the status of the request. Using WebNotification, requests will be made at a time interval, which is 5 seconds. The request will be sent to server using WebFlyPostBackManager where the status of the request will be checked. When the request has been taken by a Support member, an indicator will be returned which stated that the request has been handled. The page will be redirected to the Live Chat page, where you can start to type a message.

A message will be sent to server when you click the Send button or when you press Enter after typing the message. Hmm.. How can the support receive the message then? Well, here is where the WebNotification and WebFlyPostBackManager will be useful again. WebNotification is used to create the request in a timely interval and WebFlyPostBackManager is used to get the not-yet delivered messages. When there are still not-yet delivered messages while you type and send a message, those not-yet delivered messages will be retrieved as well, so the sequence of the messages sent and received will still be in order. The above image is the LiveChat Window in the Support member account.

A Support member can invite another Support member to help solving your issues. In that case, you will be assisted by 2 Support members. FYI, only Support members that can invite other Support member into the chat session.

Here is the Live Chat window in the invited support. Note that the messages sent and received before he is invited are not included in the conversation.

When one of them left the conversation, the chat session will not end. You can still chat with the other Support member.

When you want to end your chat session, simply click the “End Chat” command in the ToolBar or close the window. The chat sesion will be ended if you confirm the action. If you checked the “Automatically send the history of conversation to my email” checkbox at the Live Chat Login page, an email that contains the conversation history will be sent to your email.

When you have left the conversation, the chat window in the Support member view will be disabled and the message will be sent to the support team indicating that the conversation has ended.

If you think our Live Chat should have more features, please send your feedback to technical@intersoftpt.com. We will be more than happy to receive your feedback

Recently, we uploaded a new feature and some enhancements in our Developer Network (http://dev2.intersoftpt.com) and WebSite (http://www.intersoftpt.com). We are proud to announce that Live Chat is now available in TDN2 and WebSite

Simply click the LiveChat link in our website’s header and fill in the information needed. Our support team will be available from 8 AM – 5 PM (GMT + 7) to help you. If you are a registered customer, you can also use Live Chat feature available in TDN2. If you checked the auto send email checkbox in the login page, the history of your conversation will be sent to your email. We really hope these new features will give greater advantage to everyone. If you have any feedback, feel free to send it to technical@intersoftpt.com.Besides Live Chat, we also uploaded some other enhancements. Try our new window interactive mode, which now uses shadow resizing and moving to help improving the user experience. The complete description has been explained by Jimmy in here. We also have implemented classic paging in My Support and Forum. You can now navigate through the threads in classic paging mode. It is recommended for all user to change the default value of DateFilter in My Settings to All in order to get the best advantage of the classic paging feature.

More enhancements are coming, so keep reading this blog to get the latest news. Have a nice day, everyone !

In case that you haven’t aware, we have added several nice enhancements to our Developer Network.

We have added new Office 2007 Theme and have successfully migrated it to use 2007 R1 components. The results? Faster performance. Easier to use with consistent styles. Better experience.

As for the architecture part, we have migrated many modules which previously rely on SessionCache to FileServerCache. You should notice significant quicker response in this new version. Using FileServerCache also enables greater scalability and reliability, since caches are now stored on disk instead of memory. For more information about FileServerCache, see my earlier post about the feature.

To use the new Office 2007 Theme, simply bring up “My Settings” and switch into Themes tab. See the following screenshot:

We hope you enjoyed it! See ya in my next post about our upcoming SP1.

All the best,
Jimmy

We also fixed some minor issues in Dashboard and searching query text. User can now search text that includes apostrophes (‘). However, the apostrophes will be counted as string and won’t be included as special characters.

We planned to revamp Dashboard to provide more useful information for users. If you have any feedback on what information should be included in Dashboard, please send them all to technical@intersoftpt.com.

Many of our users loved the good old TreeView style navigation used in TDN v1. To respond this feedback, we have now revamped the navigation back to use TreeView mode (actually it is using a WebGrid control) — so it’s easier to navigate Hopefully the modified Forum is easier to use by now.

In My Settings, you can also set the Community Center window to be maximized on the first load so the view could be larger. We have also fixed some display issues when browsing TDN in Firefox Mozilla.

We’re currently in the way developing new website and support page which is part of our 2007 corporate rebrand initiative; a new look&feel website, with fresh style and layout. The support page will include all resources that we have about the products, such as knowledge base, online docs, FAQ, videos, white paper, online demo, etc, all collected in one integrated interface.

As usual, if you have any comments or feedbacks about this, just send them to technical@intersoftpt.com and put the subject as “TDN Feedback”. Alternatively, you can also add comments to this post.