What’s New in Windows UI 13.2?

Roughly 7 months ago, we announced the release of a brand new product from Infragistics for Windows 8 development.  Now, it is time for another update to the Infragistics Windows UI control toolset with the release of 13.2.  In our first release of Windows UI 13.1 back in April, we had put so much awesomeness into a single release, that we had to leave some great features out of the controls and had to leave them as a CTP.  So, most of our 13.2 release is all about finishing what we started in 13.1.  This means giving our xamGrid, Persistence Framework, and Excel Framework some much needed love.  We are also throwing in a new control in the form of a CTP.  Enough of the intro stuff, let’s see what we have been working on.

XamGrid

We have spent a lot of time in 13.2 getting the xamGrid just right for Windows 8.  Actually, this is where we spent the majority of our time.  If you have been using the xamGrid since it’s initial release, then you already know that the xamGrid control is a hierarchical data grid control designed to handle large amounts of data. With numerous column features, editors, and capabilities, the xamGrid is the most feature rich and functional data grid available.  It provides support for a true hierarchical data source to the n-level, allowing you to display complex business data with master/detail data relationships and different column layouts at each level. With support for paging and deferred scrolling, the xamGrid handles large data sets with no problem. Besides support for hierarchical data, you can also create n-level groupings on your data. Grouping (GroupBy) in combination with our intuitive filtering capabilities, allows you to shape your data to fit your needs with no compromises.

With the ability to define as many columns as you want, the xamGrid provides the most column options available in any grid. The xamGrid supports column moving, resizing, grouping (not to be confused with data grouping, aka GroupBy), column fixing (pinning), and even provides your end-users a column chooser all with the touch of a finger.

The xamGrid comes with the largest selection of editors on the market. Built-in editors include a CheckBox column, ComboBox column, DateTime column, Hyperlink column, Image column, and a Text column. Need more than that? No problem, the xamGrid also provides you with Template and Unbound columns to fit any scenario.

The xamGrid has been optimized for touch enabling even the most complex actions with the touch of a finger. New touch friendly selection grippers have been added to enable the selection of multiple cells with a simple drag operation. A new touch optimized column menu had been added, giving you access to common column operations such as sorting, group by, summaries, column pinning, access to the column chooser, and more, all with a simple tap gesture.

 

From data annotation support, to summaries, to clipboard support, to exporting to excel, and much more; the xamGrid is packed with features making it the most feature rich and functional data grid available for Windows 8 development.

Persistence Framework

With the Persistence Framework, you can persist control settings from any dependency object (including non-Infragistics controls) using Infragistics’ Control Persistence Framework to manage saving and loading the settings you want persisted to any external source. This framework makes it very easy for you to give your end-users the ability to save off their preferences and the layout of your application’s user interface down to the most detailed settings - such as which grid columns are fixes - and then re-load the same layout when they come back again.

Excel Framework

Using the Infragistics Excel Framework allows you to work with spreadsheet data using familiar Microsoft Excel spreadsheet objects like Workbooks, Worksheets, Cells, Formulas and many more. The Excel Library makes it easy for you to represent the data of your application in an Excel spreadsheet as well as transfer data from Excel into your application.  The best part about the Excel Framework is that it is a simple class library that runs completely independent of Microsoft Excel.  That means you don’t need to have Excel installed on the client machine.

The following is a list of the supported versions of Excel.

• Microsoft Excel 97
• Microsoft Excel 2000
• Microsoft Excel 2002
• Microsoft Excel 2003
• Microsoft Excel 2007
• Microsoft Excel 2010

XamRadialMenu (CTP)

Now, for the newest control to join the Windows UI control toolset.  The new xamRadialMenu!  Inspired by the Microsoft OneNote radial menu, the xamRadialMenu provides a circular menu that orients the commands around the user, rather than requiring the user to negotiate a nested hierarchy of drop downs. Most commonly used as a context menu, the xamRadialMenu allows you to drill down into related sub-menu items with the ability to navigate back to the main level menu item. Although the xamRadialMenu is optimized for touch, it works just as well for mouse and keyboard interactions.

As you can probably tell from the screenshots, this thing is packed with features.  It does just about everything the Microsoft OneNote Radial Menu does, but better.  I’ll cover this control in more detail in a later post.

That’s It

If you are not using our Windows UI controls yet, remember that a free evaluation download is only a click away.

If you have ideas about new features we should bring to our controls, important issues we need to fix, or even brand new controls you’d like us to introduce, please let us know by posting them on our Product Ideas website.  Follow and engage with us on Twitter via @infragistics. You can also follow and contact me directly on Twitter at @brianlagunas. Also make sure to connect with our various teams via our Community Forms where you can interact with Infragistics engineers and other customers.

Lastly, when you do build something cool with our controls, please make sure to let us know.