What's New for WPF in Ultimate 16.2

We’re pleased to announce the release of Infragistics Ultimate 16.2, featuring great additions like our Royal Dark Theme and our xamCategoryChart. We’ve also made improvements to our xamDataGrid, xamPropertyGrid, xam Calander and our charts. All of these are designed to help you build better, faster, and more usable applications.

Royal Dark Theme

We’ve always made a wide range of WPF themes available for use in your applications. One of the more popular themes has been the Metro Dark theme, which is based on larger elements for a more touch-friendly interface. There has always been a need for a dark theme for applications that don’t require larger touch-friendly elements. We used popular applications such as Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, and Blend as inspiration for a brand new WPF dark theme called Royal Dark to fill this need. This theme is supported by the Infragistics WPF Theme Manager component and ships with support for the common Microsoft intrinsic controls out of the box.

xamCategoryChart

The xamCategoryChart is a brand new charting control that makes visualizing category data a breeze. Built on top of the market’s highest performing and feature rich xamDataChart, the xamCategoryChart simplifies the complexities of the data visualization domain into an easy-to-use API. Simply data bind a collection of data, or a collection of collections, to the ItemsSource property and watch the magic happen. The xamCategoryChart will analyze the data and automatically choose the best series to represent your data. You can easily decide for yourself which type of chart to use by setting the xamDataChart.ChartType property. Choose from the following chart types:

• Line
• Area
• Column
• Point
• Spline
• Spline Area
• Step Areas
• Step Line
• Waterfall

xamDataGrid

Our WPF control suite already has one of the best grids available, but in 16.2 we’ve made it even better. We’ve added a “Select All” option to the Field Chooser. This makes it easier for users who have Field Layouts with a lot of fields to select them all without having to check every one.

A great feature of the xamDataGrid is its flexible and rich filtering capabilities. We’ve made a great improvement to filtering by adding a Cross Field Filtering feature. The current xamDataGrid filtering behavior is set to a single field at a time. Users can create as complex a filter as they want, but it can only be applied to a single field. For each field that needs a filter, a new filter must be added to that field.

With Cross Field Filtering, a user can create a single filter and apply to as many fields in a single Field Layout as they want. This means that users can now create filters that include values from many different fields that are in the same Field Layout.

New menu options have been added to the xamDataGrid’s Header Prefix Area that exposes this new cross field filtering feature.

The new cross field filtering dialog looks similar to the existing field filtering dialog, but with the difference in that it provides a ComboBox that allows the end-user to choose which Field to include in the filter.

xamPropertyGrid

Currently our xamPropertyGrid has two templates: the ReadOnlyTemplate and the EditTemplate. This is great for when you know what type of editor you will need for a specific property at design time, but not so great if you need to change your templates based on logic at run time. To enable this common scenario, we have added a new TemplateSelector property to the xamPropertyGrid that allows you to provide different read-only and edit templates at runtime based on custom logic by implementing a simple TemplateSelector.

xamCalendar

Both the xamCalendar and xamMonthCalendar have received an important new feature: Vertical Scrolling.  Prior to 16.2, the only option for scrolling the calendar was in the horizontal direction. So when using a mouse wheel, the calendar would only scroll horizontally (left to right), which often made for a confusing user experience.

Now, you can use the new ScrollDirection property to determine which direction the calendar will scroll; Horizontal (default) or Vertical. When Vertical is selected, the visual arrow indicators will change direction to indicate a vertical scroll when clicked, and when using the mouse wheel, the calendar will scroll vertically.

Charts

We revamped our charting and data visualization library, making our charts easier to use while increasing performance. Our new charting API gets you up and running faster with default options designed to cover most common use cases. In most situations, you simply need to bind your data source to a chart control and that’s it.

The new library is smarter about determining the best way to display your data, while still offering the flexibility you’d expect to make your data appear however you like. We’ve also increased the performance of our charts, making them up to two times faster, even with large data sets.

We’ve also added the ability to select specific slices in our xamPieChart. You can control the behavior of the slice selection by setting the xamPieChart.SelectionMode property.  There are three options to choose from

• Manual
• Multiple
• Single

What’s Next?

Infragistics 16.2 offers great new and unrivaled controls and features. We’re always looking for new ways to improve our products, and some of our best ideas come from our users. If you have ideas for new features, important issues we need to address or brand new controls you’d like to see, please let us know! Post them to our Product Ideas website, and be sure to follow Infragistics on Twitter for the latest news about our products. Connect with our product teams on our Community Forums, where you can interact with Infragistics engineers and other customers. And if you have any questions, comments or feedback, please feel free to drop me an email at JBender@Infragsitics.com.