Infragistics UI for WPF 17.2 - Control Retirements

With the Infragistics UI for WPF 17.2 release, we will be retiring four controls.  In this post we will discuss what it means to retire a control, what controls we are retiring, and which controls you should be using instead.

Impact of Retiring a Product

When we retire a product or control, we maintain our existing support policy:

• Bug fixes / service releases for 12 months after the retirement announcement
• 3 years of developer support on the product

The difference compared to a shipping control:

• No new features
• No potentially risky bug fixes
• Controls / Products are removed from the documentation, samples browsers, showcase applications (if applicable), installer, and website immediately

This results in:

• The final service release for these retired products / controls will be Nov 2018
• Support will expire for these retired products / controls in Nov 2020

Control Retirements and their Replacements

Effective immediately, we are officially changing the status of the following controls to Retired:

• XamBulletGraph (Infragistics.Controls.Charts)
• XamLinearGauge (Infragistics.Controls.Charts)
• XamRadialGauge (Infragistics.Controls.Charts)
• XamSegmentedDisplay (Infragistics.Controls.Charts) – no replacement

This really should come to no surprise to anyone since this process was set in motion back with our 13.1 release and 13.2 release in which we shipped three brand new controls specifically to replace the old versions.

• XamBulletGraph (Infragistics.Controls.Gauges)
• XamLinearGauge (Infragistics.Controls.Gauges)
• XamRadialGauge (Infragistics.Controls.Gauges)

The new gauges are located in the Infragistics.Controls.Gauges namespace as to not cause a collision with the older gauge controls in the Infragistics.Controls.Charts namespace.  Chances are, you are using the new gauge controls now and don’t even know it.  This is because we removed the old versions from the toolbox and samples to reduce their usage and encourage the usage of the new versions of the controls a long time ago.

You may have noticed that the XamSegmentedDisplay does not have a replacement.  So why are we retiring the xamSegmentedDisplay without a replacement?  The main reason is that the xamSegmentedDisplay is in the same assembly and namespace, and shares a large amount of code with the gauge controls.  Keeping the xamSegmentedDisplay would require use to either keep the old gauges and have the potential for confusion and conflicts, or a massive effort to surgically remove the old gauges from the assembly.  Based on the telemetry data we have, retiring the xamSegmentedDisplay makes the most sense.

If the xamSegementedDisplay control is critical to your application, please let me know. 

Summary

While this retirement has been in the works for many years now, we don’t make the decision lightly.  We realize that this may impact a number of our customer’s applications and cause a slight inconvenience.  Hopefully, the retirement of these controls will not impact you as you are already using the newer gauge controls.  If this does impact you, I would like to know about it.  Please connect with me on Twitter (@brianlagunas), email me directly at blagunas@infragistics.com, or leave a comment below for any questions or comments you may have.  I will make sure that you have all the support you need in order to migrate your old gauges to the new gauge APIs.