Finally, the wait is over! We’re very excited to announce the new Intersoft Studio 2013 release today. You can start your download here. I strongly suggest you to take a few minutes to read the press release which includes a number of important announcements – such as the Intersoft’s branding and edition changes as we’re expanding our portfolio to new market segments. You can also discover new products that are released in this milestone, and several new joint product bundles that are made available through collaboration with our partners.

Despite of the two-month delay, we trusted that the 2013 release truly worth the wait. It’s a commit of nearly 15 months of extensive research and development, putting together everything we do best across the existing lineups – from ASP.NET, Silverlight and WPF – to the new mobile development lineup. We’re pleased to announce our first version of Mobile Studio which marks a truly important milestone in our roadmap. Next, we also delivered the new Reporting lineup which is a huge addition to the existing Silverlight and WPF portfolio. Furthermore, we did not skip the ASP.NET lineup – four major upgrades are introduced in this release, making the mark of HTML5 support on all existing ASP.NET components.

On the much awaited Mobile Studio, we’re very excited to complete the first milestone which includes comprehensive cross-platform development toolset supporting four leading mobile platforms at once – iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8. We’ve successfully unified the development experiences on both Mac and Windows which enable you to work with a single solution on both operating systems without worrying the references or compatibility issues. And for the first time in our release history, we shipped the most comprehensive product guide consisted of 300 pages covering the best practices, walkthroughs and concepts for building highly scalable enterprise mobile apps. We also shipped nearly 150 samples across all the four platforms. And yes, we now provided installers for both Windows and Mac OS, so you can start building great apps with the environment and tools you love the most.

The following screenshots show the three installer options available starting from the 2013 release. The first is the Mobile Studio for Mac, while the second and third is the installer for Windows. While most customers who build ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF and mobile apps will likely choose the Premier installer, developers targeting mobile-only platforms will find the new Mobile Studio installer more compelling.

You’ll also appreciate the time-saving Crosslight Project Wizard for Visual Studio 2012 which lets you create Crosslight-enabled solution in a single click away. We shipped four project templates with customized themes/layout that you can easily choose from the Wizard. And suddenly, you can simply press F5 in Visual Studio and see native mobile apps in action. In few minutes time, you can already start building your own business mobile apps and show it off to your users. Too good to be true? We heard that, and it’s time to proof it yourself. Find out more information about Crosslight here.

In addition to many new exciting product lineups, the 2013 release also ships redesigned ASP.NET live samples and hundreds of new features and enhancements across existing lineups. For details, please check out What’s new in Premier Studio 2013.

Beyond product launches, the 2013 release puts together massive branding, identity and market positioning changes to the company in holistic way. The WebUI Studio Premier branding is no longer relevant as we’re entering the mobile segment now. As such, I’m pleased to announce the new Intersoft Premier Studio. These changes, along with the brand-new Mobile Studio joining the board, exhibits fundamental adjustment to all our infrastructure such as licensing, packaging, and online store. This leads to new direction and redesign to the company’s logo – as well as complete website revamp to deliver an authentic Intersoft’s user experiences to our customers.

Along with the website redesign of over hundreds of pages, we also introduced new Intersoft Account portal which unifies the Intersoft ID with the Intersoft Social ID. So, instead of logging into two different sites, you can now just sign into a single Intersoft Account portal and access your licenses, download the licensed products, review purchase history, print invoice, and access to your support and forum activities. Experience it yourself, head to the new Intersoft home as your starting point, then try signing into Intersoft Account portal, or visit 2013 Tour to check out the new release.

In summary, a lot of energy has been put to make this release happen – from the development team to the designer and marketing team – doing their best to make great products. We’d like to thanks all our customers and partners who have contributed valuable feedback and thoughts to make the 2013 release the most impactful release ever.

Last but not least, enjoy the new Intersoft experiences, and download your copy of the new Studio here.  We hope you love the new 2013 Studio as much as we love building it!

Best,
Jimmy

In my previous post, I shared about numoerus powerful and rich UI components that will show up in our next 2013 release for ASP.NET. In this post, I will continue to share about the next product lineup that will get major improvements in the upcoming release. Many of you have demanded new features and improvements in our flagship WebScheduler control such as better support for daylight saving in all view types, faster rendering performance, HTML5 and support for latest browsers such as IE 10 and Firefox 20.

We’re pleased to announce that the next release will include WebScheduler 4 which is strongly focused on core scheduling features and latest browsers support. It’s noteworthy that it will also sport the new modern UI with a host of enhancements and new features inside.

Better Daylight Saving Time (DST) Support

One of most anticipated feature requests that we received is to make better support for DST in WebScheduler. Our team has been hard at work and focusing to make DST support a reality in the next WebScheduler release which takes account a vast array of scenarios. By default, WebScheduler will automatically detect the DateTime settings in the server and apply it as necessary. This means that all you need to do is upgrading your project with the new WebScheduler assemblies – and you’re all set. There’s no additional settings that need to be configured.

New Modern UI Theme

In this release, you’ll be also seeing the new Modern UI visual theme. Beyond just simple CSS styling, many of the WebScheduler UI elements were completely revamped to match the Modern user experience, such as the addition of the accent-colored element, redesigned layout, and all-new icon set that conform to the Modern user interface standards. Please see the following screenshots in below.

As you can see, WebScheduler now have much cleaner look – from the tabs, calendar, to every grid lines and event. You might also notice that the event doesn’t depend on the background color anymore. The resources and event are now associated with each accent color that makes the content outstanding and beautiful. Of course, the Modern design is so much more than just styling, it also requires fundamental changes to the element structure and rendering.

In the next few screenshots, you can see that all views and elements are consistently redesigned to match the Modern visual theme.

The simple, clean and elegant UI for Callout when you select an event.

The year view gives stronger focus on content – thanks to the accent color usage in the Modern visual theme.

Only DayView, WeekView and SplitView apply the accent color at the top border side. For the rest of views event, the accent color will be applied at the left border side.

The TimeLine, Agenda and SplitView are beautifully designed in the Modern theme. Notice that all elements are rendered pixel-identically for the most elegant user experiences.

Last but not least, the built-in editing form will also receive the new Modern visual theme which will surely bring the entire scheduling experience to the next level.

With this new WebScheduler among many other major product upgrades lining up in the upcoming release, we will continue to deliver the best-of-breed ASP.NET components that boost your application development time and add great values to your apps with stunning user interface and powerful functionalities.

I hope you loved what we have to offer so far, and let me know if you have any feedback or questions.

Cheers,
Handy

We’ve recently completed the product planning and strategy for the rest of the 2013 fiscal year. There are a lot of new exciting direction in our product lineup which is exactly what I want to share in this blog post. Many of our roadmap will be based on your feedback – thanks for participating with our 2013 product survey. If you haven’t aware with the survey, please click here to participate and let your voice be heard.

Flashing back at a glance, 2012 was such an amazing year as we delivered hundreds of new controls to various .NET development platforms. We delivered major line-of-business controls which include a high-performance tree list, a multitude of data-aware controls such as pageable combobox, multiple selection combobox, innovative query builder; Windows 8 style navigation controls as well as the industry’s first charting suite with full MVVM and data binding support. In addition, all flagship ASP.NET components have been updated to support latest browsers, and several have been redesigned to support HTML5.  As you can see, it was really one of our most aggressive releases in our release history.

As you may have aware, all our product lineup so far (until 2012 R2) are mainly based on Microsoft’s .NET technology and strongly focused on line-of-business application development for the Web and Desktop platforms which include ASP.NET, Silverlight and WPF. To the date, we’re proud to empowering hundreds of thousands developers worldwide with an indispensible toolset that enables them to build .NET based business applications easily, quickly, and rapidly.

While the web and desktop platforms will still be around in the foreseeable future, we learnt that the software development landscape and paradigm has shifted aggressively to target mobile devices. Of course, that’s not a new story as the mobile development ecosystem has existed since the advent of iPhone and Android devices. Back at those times, most apps were targeting consumers – and there are very little needs or demands in the business or enterprise spaces for mobile apps. However, based on our extensive research and development since the past year, and based on the demands from our enterprise customers, we’ve seen the light shed on the mobile world. Read on.

Enter the Mobile World

At Intersoft, our ultimate mission is to create incredibly powerful and easy-to-use tools that enable rapid business application development. From ASP.NET, Silverlight to WPF – we’ve accomplished our mission very well. This year, we will continue our development journey to the other side of the world – the mobile development world. I’m very excited to announce that the mobile tools development will now become our priority and we’re committed to deliver successful mobile tools – just as we’ve successfully delivered hundreds of ASP.NET, Silverlight and WPF tools.

Why entering the mobile development world, you might ask. There are a number of reasons why we finally decided to jump into the mobile bandwagon, but I’ll try to keep my answer simple: because it’s the future of computing. Sure, people will continue to use their PC at home (as in Gates vision “One PC at every home’s desk”), but today people no longer spent most of their time on the PC – thanks (or blame) to the powerful ARM-based mobile devices that allows you to do many productivity tasks on the go.

The same paradigm has now entered the small and medium business as well as larger enterprises. Ask yourself this question, why would you need a PC on your office desk if you can login to your corporate network and check your sales reports, signing documents, review executive dashboards and many more – all with the small mobile device in your hand? Furthermore, with low-cost and affordable mobile devices today, businesses have started to reveal the benefits and advantages of mobile over PC such as reduced TCO and maximized employees productivity. As businesses increase their interest and demands on mobile, that will mean one thing in the end: increased demands on business mobile application development

Ultimately, that will simply mean one thing to you: get yourself ready for mobile development. And to us: get ready to deliver mobile tools for rapid business apps development.

Mobile Development Challenges

As a third party .NET vendor, it makes sense to choose the easiest and closest route to enter the mobile development, and that would be definitely the Windows Phone or WinRT since both are still based on .NET platform. The main problem, however, is the relatively slow adoption rate which makes it less appealing on the business side. This is understandable because enterprises cannot control what mobile devices their employees and consumers use. Most requirements that we heard from our enterprise clients will be to support at least two of the most owned mobile devices. Needless to say, that will definitely fall to iOS and Android based devices. As we see it, one of the biggest challenges here is multiple mobile platforms support, just like multiple browsers support in the Web development.

Obviously, we all loved .NET and C# which has been our mother language for decades. And also to the Silverlight and the great MVVM pattern that allow us to layer our applications in a way that enables truly scalable and extensible architecture. As you discover the mobile development, you will find horrible platform divergences and unfortunately none of your favorite skills are applicable in these mobile native platforms, for examples, iOS uses Objective-C while Android uses Java. Alternatively, you may want to resort to HTML5 – only if your users afford mediocre and compromised user experiences.

If you’re Silverlight or WPF developers, you may feel – at a glance – reaching the bottom of your career. You might be unfamiliar with Objective-C or Java, yet you hated JavaScript. It’s a rather difficult choice – go learn Objective-C, Java and WinRT; or anxiously waiting for new clients wanting to build Silverlight apps. None of these choices sound appealing.

But wait a second, what if it’s possible to write native iOS and Android apps leveraging exactly the same .NET skillset that you already accustomed to? And takes it even further, what if you can build iOS and Android apps using your favorite Silverlight-style data binding and MVVM pattern? That would be too good to be true, you might think. If such “possibility” exists, that will not only save your careers and make your development life a lot easier, but more importantly, it opens up a whole new opportunities to explore and a lot of potential business apps that you can contribute for the world.

Frankly speaking, we’ve been extensively researching to look for that “possibility” in the past years. We were silent and seemingly have no progress whatsoever when it comes to mobile. That’s because we want to ensure everything before we gave you that shed of light, the news of the existence of that “possibility”. We’re almost there, read on.

Introducing Crosslight

So here we are. I’m honored to be the first to announce our mobile tool project codename “Crosslight”. Yup, Crosslight. As if it’s the reborn of Silverlight, Crosslight enables you to use the same Silverlight and MVVM skillset to create cross-platform mobile applications. And so that’s how the name was coined. I tend to think the philosophy this way “The light to the cross-platform mobile development”.

If you’ve developed MVVM-based Silverlight apps using our ClientUI library, you’ll find pretty much the same thing in Crosslight. You’ll find delegate command, event aggregator, IoC container, and everything you loved about MVVM such as ViewModel, and converter. So far, we’ve managed to revive many of the data binding capabilities found in Silverlight such as two-way data binding, converter, nested property path binding, collection binding, item templating and more – and we have recreated all those capabilities to both iOS and Android platforms.

At the end, you’ll be able to create business apps that are not only targeting iOS and Android, but also targeting Windows Phone 8 and WinRT. I hope you’ve got it clear at this point, Crosslight is all about modern mobile development, from iOS, Android, to Windows Phone 8 and WinRT. Along the way, we will be also introducing our new technology partner who provides non Microsoft implementation of .NET that makes Crosslight a reality. Stay tuned for the upcoming announcement.

We believe that the best and the right direction for the mobile development is to build mobile apps using the native SDK of each platform – instead of hybrid HTML5 apps. Now that you can build amazing mobile apps with C# and MVVM, there are no reasons for not building one with native SDK which offers the best, uncompromised user experiences.

Soon – hopefully before the end of March – you’ll be able to beta testing Crosslight and start building your first cross-platform, MVVM-based mobile business apps.

Silverlight, WPF, ASP.NET and HTML5

Now that we’re going to have Crosslight, what’s going to happen to Silverlight and the rest of .NET platforms? Needless to worry, we’re highly committed to the existing platforms who make the most of our customer base. We will continue to make new best-of-breed components for Silverlight and WPF – particularly the new Reporting lineup which has been in development since last year. This reporting lineup is huge and noteworthy – because we’ll bring in new technologies that weren’t possible previously. That’s mainly because most reporting players in the market didn’t build their Silverlight/WPF reporting product from the scratch, but simply porting from .NET 2.x based which used old and outdated techniques.

On the ASP.NET lineup, this year we will have major upgrades to all our ASP.NET components. And when we say “all”, we really mean it. This simply means that all ASP.NET components will be redesigned to support HTML5 and CSS3, including WebEssentials, WebInput, and WebTreeView. Also expect new version of WebScheduler with improved day light saving and time zone support, as well as new version of WebTextEditor with IE10 support and much more.

Wrapping up

At this point, you can see for yourself that 2013 is going to be a very exciting year for all of us. The new Crosslight, and new tools across Silverlight, WPF and ASP.NET will keep us busy enough throughout the year. In the upcoming 2013 R1 release, we will be the first vendor to offer toolset with the broadest platforms support– ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, iOS, Android, Windows Phone and WinRT.

This is probably the longest product roadmap blog that I’ve ever wrote so far. But I hope you enjoy reading and learning our roadmap, and hopefully it gives you insights about our direction, where we will spend our time and effort the most, and what you will receive as part of your on-going annual subscriptions. So the next thing that you should do is checking your account and make sure your Premier subscriptions are up-to-date for the rest of the year.

To find out more details about our 2013 roadmap, please logon to Intersoft Developer Network using your Intersoft ID to read the complete details about the upcoming products as well as the release schedules. After logged on, bring up the Home window, then click on the link in the Announcement section to open the product roadmap window.

For prospect customers who are interested in our 2013 roadmap, please send your email to sales@intersoftpt.com to request a copy. We’ll send you a copy of NDA to be signed in order to receive the roadmap details.

Best,
Jimmy

Last year I posted an article which showed how to store the files which are uploaded using UXFileUpload (ClientUI control for Silverlight and WPF) in database. In this article, I will show a similar scenario which can be done using WebFileUploader, a member of Intersoft Solutions ASP.NET controls.

WebFileUploader is an easy to use; high performance and advanced file upload component which allows you to upload multiple files without page refresh. WebFileUploader uses 100% HTML technology for all its features, and fully supports all modern browsers including Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera. Using 100% HTML technology means that WebFileUploader doesn’t require Flash plug-in to support multiple files uploading and many other features.

This scenario, to store the uploaded files in database, can be divided to two parts. The first part is to configure WebFileUploader for IIS application; and the other part, using server-side code to process uploaded files and store them into database.

To configure WebFileUploader for IIS application

Some configuration is needed in the web.config to run WebFileUploader in IIS. The list below shows how to configure WebFileUploader for IIS 7 application.

1. By default, ASP.NET application restricts maximum request length to 4 MB. To enable our application to accept larger files, please configure the maxRequestLength in web.config to higher value. The maxRequestLength value is measured in kilobytes. Here is a snippet to increase your file size to 100MB.

   <configuration>
     <system.web>
       <httpRuntime maxRequestLength="102400" />
     </system.web>
   </configuration>

2. Add WebFileUploader handler to <handlers> section under <system.webServer>. Here is the snippet.

   <add name="WebFileUploaderHttpHandler" verb="GET"
     path="WebFileUploaderHttpHandler.axd"
     type="ISNet.WebUI.WebTextEditor.WebFileUploaderHttpHandler, ISNet.WebUI.WebTextEditor"
     preCondition="integratedMode" />

3. Add WebFileUploader module to <modules> section under <system.webServer> in our project web.config. Here is the snippet.

   <add name="WebFileUploaderHttpModule" preCondition="managedHandler"
     type="ISNet.WebUI.WebTextEditor.WebFileUploaderHttpModule, ISNet.WebUI.WebTextEditor" />

4. Set maxAllowedContentLength to a higher value, which is measured in bytes, to 100MB in web.config. This attribute specifies the maximum length of content in a request. The default value is 30000000, which is approximately 28.6 MB.

   <system.webServer>
     <security>
       <requestFiltering>
         <requestLimits maxAllowedContentLength="104857600" />
       </requestFiltering>
     </security>
   </system.webServer>

5. Unlock the mode override in applicationHost.config. Open IIS 7 application configuration file, the default location is in C:windowssystem32inetsrvconfig, and change the overrideModeDefault to Allow.

   <section name="requestFiltering" overrideModeDefault="Allow" />

Save the changes and then try to upload a file. If WebFileUploader has been successfully uploaded the file to the designated folder, it means that we are on half way to achieve the goal and ready to proceed to the next step.

Using server-side code to process uploaded files and store them into database

A database, called Files.mdf, is added into the App_Data folder of the web project. This database has Files table which consists of following fields.

A Stored Procedure, sprocFilesInsertSingleItem, will be used to insert a single item of file into Files.mdf database.

INSERT INTO Files
(
	Id,
	FileUrl,
	FileData,
	OriginalName
)
VALUES
(
	@id,
	@FileUrl,
	@FileData,
	@originalName
)

Next, we are going to use the OnAfterUpload server-side event of WebFileUploader. It is the server-side event which fired when a file upload is succeeded. Generally, there are three processes to be performed on this event.

• Read and manipulate the uploaded file using FileStream class.
• Invoke and execute sprocFilesInsertSingleItem stored procedure to store the uploaded file on Files.mdf database.
• Delete the specified file from the UploadPath folder.

protected void WebFileUploader1_AfterUpload(object sender, ISNet.WebUI.WebTextEditor.WebFileUploaderFileEventArgs e)
{
    byte[] fileData = ReadFile(e.WebFileUploadInfo.Path + "\" + e.WebFileUploadInfo.FileName);
    string originalName = e.WebFileUploadInfo.FileName;

    using (SqlConnection mySqlConnection = new SqlConnection(@"Data Source=.SQLEXPRESS;AttachDbFilename=|DataDirectory|Files.mdf;Integrated Security=True;Connect Timeout=30;User Instance=True"))
    {
        // Set up the Command object
        SqlCommand myCommand = new SqlCommand("sprocFilesInsertSingleItem", mySqlConnection);
        myCommand.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure;

        // Set up the ID parameter
        SqlParameter prmId = new SqlParameter("@id", SqlDbType.UniqueIdentifier);

        Guid id = Guid.NewGuid();
        prmId.Value = id;
        myCommand.Parameters.Add(prmId);

        // Set up the FileUrl parameter
        SqlParameter prmFileUrl = new SqlParameter("@fileUrl", SqlDbType.NVarChar, 255);

        prmFileUrl.Value = DBNull.Value;
        myCommand.Parameters.Add(prmFileUrl);

        // Set up the FileData parameter
        SqlParameter prmFileData = new SqlParameter("@fileData ", SqlDbType.VarBinary);

        prmFileData.Value = fileData;
        prmFileData.Size = fileData.Length;
        myCommand.Parameters.Add(prmFileData);

        // Set up the OriginalName parameter
        SqlParameter prmOriginalName = new SqlParameter("@originalName", SqlDbType.NVarChar, 50);
        prmOriginalName.Value = e.WebFileUploadInfo.FileName;
        myCommand.Parameters.Add(prmOriginalName);

        // Execute the command, and clean up.
        mySqlConnection.Open();
        bool result = myCommand.ExecuteNonQuery() > 0;
        mySqlConnection.Close();
    }

    File.Delete(e.WebFileUploadInfo.Path + "\" + e.WebFileUploadInfo.FileName);
}

private static byte[] ReadFile(string filePath)
{
    byte[] buffer;
    FileStream fileStream = new FileStream(filePath, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read);

    try
    {
        int length = (int)fileStream.Length; // get file length
        buffer = new byte[length];           // create buffer
        int count;                           // actual number of bytes read
        int sum = 0;                         // total number of bytes read

        // read until Read method returns 0 (end of the stream has been reached)
        while ((count = fileStream.Read(buffer, sum, length - sum)) > 0)
        {
            sum += count; // sum is a buffer offset for next reading
        }
    }
    finally
    {
        fileStream.Close();
    }

    return buffer;
}

That’s it! Now the files uploaded by WebFileUploader control will be stored in database. It’s pretty easy and straightforward, don’t you think so?

Click here to download the sample and feel free to drop me a line in the comment box if you find this post useful.

Today, we have posted an update to the WebUI Studio 2012 R2 installer which addressed a few glitches related to samples and installation. In addition, the installer “refresh” also includes newer product builds across ASP.NET, Silverlight and WPF tools for enhanced cross-platform compatibility and improved reliability. It’s highly recommended to install WebUI Studio 2012 R2 using the latest installer which you can download here.

The installer “refresh” includes numerous updates that are focused around the new technical samples for Silverlight and WPF. In case you didn’t aware, we now include comprehensive technical samples starting from this release. The difference with the live samples is that technical samples are strongly focused on the product features – and there are no fancy stuff such as decorator graphics or complex styling – so you can quickly and easily discover the “how-to” and knowledge to implement a particular feature of the new products.

If you haven’t seen the technical samples yet, now is a good time to take a look at it. It’s installed by default, and can be found in the Intersoft WebUI Studio program group under the respective platform group. In this release, the technical samples include over 150 samples for charting and 40 samples for the other new products such as Query Builder, Property Grid and BreadCrumb.

Each feature of the new product is covered in each separate sample, making it easy for you to learn the context of a particular feature. With simple interface and intuitive navigation, getting around with the samples is easy and fast – you should try it for yourself.

Note that the technical samples is available in both Silverlight and WPF platform with the same codebase. The WPF samples demonstrate that the same features available in Silverlight are also working flawlessly in WPF – from the basic features to the animation and user experiences. Here’s the screenshot for the technical samples in WPF.

Again, the technical samples is installed by default when you install WebUI Studio for Silverlight and WPF, so there’s no additional download needed. It can be found in the Intersoft WebUI Studio program group under the respective platform group.

I hope you enjoyed the comprehensive learning resources we added in this release. Any questions or feedback are highly welcomed. Thank you for reading!

First of all, Happy New Year! I hope you enjoyed building apps with our tools in the past year, and we look forward to work with you again in 2013! We’ve plenty of exciting new products that we’re planning in this new year, and we’ll update our roadmap shortly in the next few weeks.

In case you missed the news, we’ve shipped the 2012 R2 volume release last month. You can download it here, and check out the what’s new list here. In addition to the new products listed in the “what’s new” list, the R2 release actually ships much more new features and enhancements that weren’t listed in the website. For instances, we also introduced sophisticated “cell locking” feature in UXGridView, brand-new theme manager, performance improvements in all combobox-variant controls, new usability feature in UXRibbon, and much more.

Where can I see all the new features and enhancements, you might asked. It’s in the documentation that you can access online today. The online product documentation features lightweight navigation interface similar to those in Help Viewer. You can easily browse through each topic from the left-side tree navigation, or from the breadcrumb at the top.

I’ve compiled several interesting topics that I think you should check out:

• What’s New in ClientUI 8
• Theme Manager Overview
• UXChart Overview
• UXBreadCrumb Overview
• UXQueryBuilder Overview
• UXPropertyGrid Overview
• Walkthrough and How-to Topics

In addition to the online documentation, we’ve also recently updated the online samples for ASP.NET. The online samples now reflect the latest release which includes all-new WebDesktop samples demonstrating HTML5 and CSS3 support. In addition, many of the samples have been updated to the latest Modern UI styles.

Among dozens of WebDesktop controls that receive full HTML5 support, one that is quite noteworthy is the WebPaneManager control which undergone major surgery in order to achieve “fluid layout” that works in HTML5 browsers. If you’ve worked with layouting in HTML5, I trust you already foresee the difficulty level to create “fluid layout” that supports dynamic width/height, not to mention the support for nested groups and resizing and other UX features. Luckily, you can easily achieve complex layout now using the enhanced WebPaneManager control. See the following screenshot for example.

The beauty of the new WebPaneManager is that it’s very lightweight – thanks to the revamped layout from TABLE to DIV, and more importantly, it supports combination of fluid and static width/height – all without requiring scripting! This means that when users resize the browser, they’ll see real-time response. We haven’t seen a control with such capabilities thus far in the market, so we’re pleased to be the first delivering such innovative controls to you.

Well, you can check out the WebPaneManager samples and the rest of updated ASP.NET online samples here. Enjoy!

Best,
Jimmy

Finally, the wait is over! The new WebUI Studio 2012 R2 release is here with tons of new exciting tools and templates that will surely boost up your development productivity. Despite of the slight delay, I trust the new release worth the wait. First off, we don’t just release new controls to add to your toolbox, we also ship a number of new templates to help you quickly getting started with your projects. Furthermore, we’ve added over 175 new technical samples and over 75 new reference samples – all with brand-new look and feel and completely redesigned user experiences. With these inspiring samples, we wanted to help you unleash your big ideas and creativity and take them to the next level.

Alright, before we gone too far, here are some important links that you’ll need for this new release.

• Download WebUI Studio 2012 R2
• What’s New in 2012 R2
• ASP.NET Live Samples
• ClientUI Live Samples

All-new, Completely Redesigned Live Samples.

In addition to many new controls we shipped in this release, we’re pleased to announce the all-new ClientUI live samples with completely redesigned user interface. It’s now featuring larger screen real estate, clean and modern design that allows one to focus better on content, and more intuitive navigation. And for the first time since its first debut 4 years ago, all controls now perform 70% faster than before – thanks to the continuous performance tuning and memory usage optimization.

More importantly, the new live samples puts some of the new R2 controls in action, so you can see how they can be leveraged in your own apps. I’m particularly referring to the new breadcrumb navigation control which completely redefines the overall navigation experiences. Combining hybrid address bar and menu functionality into an elegant user interface, you can now perform navigation in a simple “point-and-click” manner. Let’s take a look at the overview of the redesigned live samples below.

And because we loved this intuitive navigation control so much, we decided to release it as a standalone reusable control to our valued customers. Feel free to unleash your big ideas and make it work your own way. Desktop application developers may rejoice! The navigation control is also available in WPF version, so you can be the first to build Windows 8 Explorer style business applications! We also shipped a WPF project template that leverages this versatile navigation control. More on that later.

In addition to the intuitive navigation, you can notice a whole new user experience that our designer team have put into this new live samples, for instances, it sports the improved CoverFlow with realistic depth shadow, better coverage on What’s New and Featured section – thanks to the fluid design allowing you to see more items in larger screen and adapts to reduced items in smaller screen.

And now to the core part, the entire sample canvas has been revamped as well. Unnecessary toolbars and buttons are gone, fancy gradients are wiped out, options and other navigation elements are centralized to a collapsible pane. Embracing on the modern design, it’s now possible for us to create beautiful, full-screen user experience. See the following screenshot for details.

Enough said, visit the new ClientUI live samples now and experience it for yourself.

In this blog post, I only scratched the surface of the new exciting stuff that we delivered in this release. We’re fully passionate about design and user experiences that balance very well with functionality – and we carefully put that into the engineering process. That said, you can find that all our controls are engineered with thoughtful user experiences, in addition to the rich features and functionalities of course – that’s what sets us apart from other products in the market.

Last but not least, enjoy WebUI Studio 2012 R2! Hopefully this release comes just in time, so you can play around it now and make some planning for your big ideas in the next year. Again, here’s the link to download in case you haven’t done so, and make sure you check out the complete what’s new list here.

All the best,
Jimmy

Continuing my blog series on our upcoming release, I’m pleased to share the final part of WebDesktop’s development for HTML5 and CSS3. In my previous posts, I’ve shared the development progress of converting WebDesktopManager controls into HTML5. You can check the previous posts here: Part 1 and Part 2. In this final part of my post, I’m going to cover the new features for the rest of WebDesktop controls such as WebDesktopManager, WebDialogBox, WebPaneManager, WebSplitter, WebNotification and many others.

In version 4, WebDesktop has been refined to fully support the latest web standards. This allows you to use many of the advanced WebDesktop features in your next-generation web applications and at the same time leveraging cutting-edge technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3. With our latest innovation of “Windows 8 ready” Component Designer, you can easily configure every properties and styles using the latest Visual Studio 2012.

WebNavPane

WebNavPane is one of the many UI controls demanded by application developers. Unfortunately, the existing WebNavPane was designed for HTML4 which mainly uses table for layouting. The first time when we convert WebNavPane to HTML5, we encountered issues with the layout such as shown below:

As you can see, WebNavPane’s border doesn’t get rendered properly and the container becomes smaller. After improving the control to support HTML5, the layout and rendering now shows a perfect results, such as shown below:

Furthermore, we’ve also added a metro style in the latest WebNavPane. This control has been redesigned and developed to fully inherit the styles in Windows 8. And of course, we’re ready to give the best UI in styles and performance in the latest Windows 8.

WebCallOut

Previously, we’ve discussed about the layout issues occurring in WebCallOut when it is set to HTML5 in the beginning. The rendering is completely messed up and the pointer is also offset from the correct position. After numerous improvements made, we’re happy to introduce metro styling in the latest WebCallOut. The metro styles consist of Metro Orange, Metro Silver and metro Simple such as shown below:

WebExplorerPane

We’ve extremely improved WebExplorerPane from its layout. Rendering its layout in HTML5 is much more complex than HTML4. However, we’ve managed to overcome these obstacles and proudly introduced the new metro style in the latest WebExplorerPane.

It perfectly renders and matches the “Windows 8-ready” styling starting from its layout, font color and style and many others.

WebDesktopManager

As we’ve discussed in previous Part 2, there are numerous enhancements in the window and desktop rendering. Since the new specification in HTML5 introduces a number of limitations of TABLE usage, therefore we’ve decided to remove all TABLE usage and use DIV instead.

WebDesktop 4 has added 3 new features to give users freedom in perform styling over WebDesktopManager. Now, the icon in Taskbar is no longer depending on window or shortcut. They can be determined by defining the TaskBarImage property in WebDesktopWindow or WebDesktopShortcut.

You can perform styling to container when using complex image border type. In the previous version, the container’s style will not be assigned in the container itself when using complex image. Starting from WebDesktop 4, you can easily perform styling by setting the ApplyContainerStyle property to true.

WebDialogBox

The changes made in WebDialogBox is almost similar to WebDesktopWindow. By inheriting WebDesktopWindow’s structure, WebDialogBox is rendered using DIV instead of TABLE. With HTML5, the rendering of each browser will be more consistent and more solid than HTML4. WebDialogBox also supports CSS3 for its styling.

Introducing Metro theme for WebDesktop

Since the invention of “Metro” design language, Microsoft has been redesigning all its software products toward the modern UI design, including the recently released Microsoft Windows 8. As a leading tool vendor, we’re pleased to be the among the first to support Metro design language.

That said, our designer team has designed a comprehensive Metro theme that can be easily applied to all existing WebDesktop controls such as WebDesktopManager, WebDialogBox, WebTab and so on. Each control theme is thoughtfully designed to get the right look and feel particularly when it comes to contrast colors. See the screenshot below.

The following screenshots show the Metro theme running on WebDesktop 4. Remember, these are real web applications built on ASP.NET, and run on your favorite browsers.

The new WebDesktop 4 will be available in the upcoming R2 release which is going to be shipped anytime soon in this December 2012. Be sure to stay updated with the next announcement.

Cheers,
Handy

It’s really been a busy month for everyone in the DevDiv at Intersoft as we’re heading toward R2 release. As we haven’t post any new updates recently, you might have been wondering what we’re up to. Thankfully, you’ve just tuned in at the right time because I have some very exciting updates to share in this blog post.

For a decade, we’ve been doing what we do best – creating user interface components that are beautiful inside and out where amazing user experiences meet powerful functionality. And today, we’ve made some of the world’s best tools that help developers build amazing applications ahead of time. But we don’t stop here. In the upcoming release, you’ll find a handful of new exciting tools that do what it does best, so you can stay focused on your business requirements and things that matter the most to you.

The upcoming R2 release is an exceptionally important milestone for us and our valued customers. After nearly a year of intensive development iterations, we’re pleased to say that we’ve recently reaching the stable sprints and will deliver two of the most wanted products in this release.

For the first time ever, say hello to Intersoft’s own charting data visualization suite which will target a broad range of platforms. And business developers may rejoice! A full-fledged XAML reporting engine is coming your way which includes a powerful C# style scripting support for the most demanding business reports. Read on.

Gorgeous charts. Uncompromised performance.

Written from the ground up, Intersoft Charting delivers everything you need to create beautiful charts for your business apps, plus dozens of innovative features not available elsewhere.

We started off our engineering by creating  an advanced canvas that provides reliable support for interactivity features such as zooming, panning, and box selection. We took the zooming capability to the next level by supporting horizontal, vertical, or both directions. And together with smooth panning, resizing with aspect ratio locking and region zoom, Intersoft Charting is built for touch-first user experiences in mind.

Furthermore, Intersoft Charting employs the most advanced rendering technique that puts data points and lines in the most accurate device pixel in your screen. This translates to crystal clear results, and no more blurry lines!

Designed by Intersoft’s own artists, the brand new charting will offer four predefined color schemes and styles that you can choose with a simple property set. Whether you prefer vivid colors, natural colors, or Metro colors, there’s a palette for that. Or if you prefer to use your own palettes, feel free to define as many custom palettes as you like and reuse them throughout the chart instances.

With numerous great features such as smart axis intervals, MVVM support for series binding, linked charts, and over 20+ stunning chart types; we’re confident that Intersoft Charting will deliver an ultimate, enterprise-grade data visualization solution for all your application development needs. More details on Charting will be posted in a separate post by our engineers.

Build Complex Query Visually

Business users have been long asking for the flexibility to edit queries/filters at runtime, but very few provide such functionality in the market. One of the reasons is the design challenges that require extensive research on the user experiences to make it work beautifully. I’m excited to introduce our newest data-aware control lineups: UXQueryBuilder.

Query Builder is an advanced data filtering control that allows users to visually build complex queries/filters. Take a look at the Query Builder’s control design below.

It’s designed in such a way that allows users to interact with complex nested conditions through an intuitive, modern user interface. When a nested filter is added, the control automatically creates a visual branch. It’s also packed with numerous built-in subtle animations to deliver smooth user experiences, such as when a condition is added or removed, and when a single condition is converted to a composite condition.

More importantly, the Query Builder works seamlessly with all ClientUI data controls that are built upon QueryDescriptor framework. This means that you can connect the Query Builder to a Grid View in a simple property set. And you’ll find that things just work – adding a new filter condition and see the Grid’s data will be filtered accordingly.

One of the engineering excellences we put on this control is the capability to support Entity Framework’s navigation properties out of the box – you gotta love this feature! So whenever the Query Builder finds navigation properties in your object, it will list them to the available properties which users can use as the filter condition without extra efforts at developer’s end. Of course, you can exclude certain navigation properties if desired.

And in most cases, your data model might include master-detail relations, think of Product  table that has CategoryID field. It won’t make sense for users to remember the ID to be able to filter a category – I trust you’ll agree with me on that! Thankfully, we built a feature that lets you pre-populate the master data when the control requires it. We make it as simple as possible so that you only have to define an attribute to your model and specify the class that will handle the data retrieval, either synchronously or asynchronously.

Modern UI Themes and Design Templates

All the buzzes and hypes are on Windows 8 as Microsoft launched its latest operating system last week. Although the new UI looks cool and modern at a glance, it could be very challenging in the design process. Without thoughtful design, you may eventually end up with too-plain, boring colorful boxes. I’ve started to find such apps in the Windows Store which exhibits lower apps quality and leads to poor user experiences.

The good news is that we’ll be coming up with very exciting and fresh design themes that comply with the Windows 8 Modern UI. We decided to include the new themes in this upcoming release, thanks to your vote up. Every control is redesigned meticulously – pixel by pixel, color by color, and shape by shape – to create look and feel that are fresh and modern. The result is a balanced combination of design that embraces modern lines but still look great on eyes.

But we don’t just create themes, we took it to a whole new level where the entire design is connected to a set of accent colors that you can personalize, thanks to the brand-new theme manager. We designed the templates from the bottom up in order to achieve a kind of design that looks great in both light and dark theme, on the top of the customizable color theme. Every design aspects, from the font family, size, vector-based icons and colors are all thoughtfully connected to achieve such beautiful results.

It’s such an excellent engineering process that combines great architecture and beautiful design that makes it possible for the theme color to change instantly without performance degradation no matter how complex your content is. There are no visual tree tracing, no dependencies on certain structures or classes, and definitely no heavy-lifting such as scanning all the controls within the page.

And the best of all, our design team will come up with a few stunning project templates that you can use instantly to create your next-generation, modern-style business apps in both Silverlight and WPF platforms.

And more…

In this blog post, I’ve only scratched the surface of what we’ll come up with in the upcoming release. There are much more new exciting lineups that I couldn’t cover in this single post. In conclusion, this release will be a very important milestone for us and our customers, particularly as we’re entering two huge market segments at once.

Finally, I hope you liked what you see so far. And if you’ve got questions or feedback, make sure you write them down in the comment box below. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for my next post!

All the best,
Jimmy

Last week, Microsoft has finally released its long awaited Visual Studio 2012 to the MSDN subscribers. As VSIP partners, we had the RTM bits several weeks earlier and started testing our component designer features for the new Visual Studio.

Just in timely fashion, we’ve recently completed the development and testing milestones for our new component designer – rebuilt entirely from the scratch to provide the best support for Visual Studio 2012. In this blog post, I’ll share some of the design experiences while remaking our component designer. Read on.

The Visual Studio 2012 UX Guidelines

Since the invention of “Metro” design language, Microsoft has been redesigning all its software products toward the modern UI design, including the recently released Visual Studio 2012. As a result of the redesign, Microsoft has now introduced the so-called “Visual Studio 2012 UX Guidelines” which has to be adhered by its development ecosystem partners. We’re thrilled to be among the first who have adhered to the UX guidelines, and will release our new version at the same time of the official Visual Studio 2012 launch.

To adhere to the UX guidelines, our designer team have redesigned nearly 200+ toolbox icons to the Metro style. Furthermore, we decided to remake the component designer to support the new look and feel of Visual Studio 2012, and more importantly, to support the philosophy of the user experiences which essentially emphasizes on content with reduced decorators.

Meet the new Component Designer for Visual Studio 2012. It’s rebuilt entirely from the scratch to resemble the Visual Studio 2012 interface. The all-new designer is now built on the WPF 4 platform and leveraging our own ClientUI for WPF controls – thanks to the comprehensive and easily style-able controls, we managed to remake the component designer ahead of the expected schedule.

The following screenshot shows the new WebUI Studio component designer with much cleaner design and Metro’s iconography.

It’s important to note that previous version of Visual Studio will continue to be supported. The WebUI Studio component designer launches the new WPF-based designer only when it’s running inside Visual Studio 2012. This is made possible thanks to the loosely-coupled architecture in the component designer framework.

So, when you’re working with WebUI Studio components in Visual Studio 2008 or 2010, you’ll get the old, clunky component designer with sea of colors. And when you’re in Visual Studio 2012, it automatically launches the new modern-styled component designer. Keep in mind that the control assemblies are identical regardless of the Visual Studio version.

The shots below show the designer comparison between the Visual Studio 2010 and 2012.

One of the most useful benefits with the migration to WPF is that you get automatic support for the screen resolution and font scaling. This means that if your Windows is set to use 125% larger font, the component designer will automatically reflect the control and layout to fit to the desired scale. The WinForms layout didn’t have that luxury, and it’s extremely difficult to manage the auto scaling settings. This is why you’ll find many inappropriately truncated text and graphics in the old designer when using larger font scaling.

Furthermore, the WPF designer has much better performance compared to WinForms in terms of initial loading, rendering, animation and navigation. This allows us to achieve the “fast and fluid” user experiences.

Back to the main subject, we actually reimagine all aspects of the designer – whether it’s the functionality or the design. For examples, compared to the previous version, the new Layout Manager has much cleaner surface, and eventually makes it more intuitive and easier-to-use at a glance. The art of this design language is that it focuses on the content and brings the functionality back to where it supposed to be. Take a look at the screenshot below.

We also pay attention on the user experience details where message boxes should be avoided whenever possible. In this remake, we’re now displaying important messages in the accented status bar.

Meanwhile, the Structure Manager is also redesigned with the identical aesthetic and consistent layout, enabling users to understand the user interface with less learning curves.

Simplified and Smarter User Experiences

One thing that we learnt about Metro design language is that it’s not only about the user interface, i.e., the colors, themes or shapes. The true essences behind the philosophy is the simplified user experiences. But, the “simplified” here doesn’t necessary mean removing features, it’s more to making user experiences smarter which allows users to perform a task or function in less time, and more efficiently.

We have a number of interesting stories about making user experiences simpler yet smarter while remaking the component designer for WebGrid.

With hundreds of features, it’s quite challenging to find a particular setting or feature in the property window. So we introduced a component designer to address this challenge that looks like the following shot.

I personally think that the idea and purpose of such designer is good, although the existing design may now look cluttered. At a glance, the settings are spreading everywhere. Notice that we have numerous in the left-side navigation vertically, and also some tabs in the top arranged horizontally.

In the WebGrid designer remake, we managed to put everything back to where it should through a deep category rearrange that is based on content and function similarity. Tabs such as Advanced, Localization Manager and Pivot Charting are now removed from the top since they are now part of the Properties. Redundant navigation items are merged into a content that makes more sense. See the shots below to get a closer look.

With the designs shown above, you’re no longer served with massive user interface elements that present the same function. So the Properties tab basically means that “come here for all settings-related tasks”. This allows us to keep the design ideal with balanced functionality. Lessons learned.

Similarly, we simplify the Caching and Performance Tuning tabs such as shown below…

… into just a single Advanced tab shown below.

We designed smarter user experiences by categorizing them into expandable groups styled with lightly-shaded accent and Metro colors.

Furthermore, the new designer is not simply a remaking effort, we actually added a number of new options that makes performance tuning a breeze. Notice the red highlighted area in the shot above, you can now enable the built-in resources compression with a single click. This feature actually existed since the 2009 release, but not easily discoverable as you need to manually make changes to the web.config file.

More options are now added to the Common Settings view which includes the new features introduced in the recent releases. For instances, enabling HTML5 rendering mode across the application is simply a tick away.

All 40+ Component Designer Redesigned

In this blog post, I’ve only scratched the surface of our new component designer for Visual Studio 2012. In addition to flagship products such as WebGrid, we also update the designer of entire WebUI Studio family, including WebCombo, WebInput, WebScheduler, WebTextEditor and the rest of components resembled in WebDesktop and WebEssentials.

As far as I can say, we’re making WebUI Studio the first-class citizen of Visual Studio 2012 which enables both products to work best together for the ultimate application development experiences.

We’re expecting to deliver all these new exciting features in the upcoming WebUI Studio service pack release by next week – and hopefully faster. The service pack will also include many new enhancements for Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10, all-new project templates for Visual Studio 2012, as well as reliability improvements to all Silverlight and WPF components. Stay tuned for the release announcement!

Best,
Jimmy