I am very confused by the new release of 11.2 with regard to the xamTilesControl. This post http://blogs.infragistics.com/blogs/atanas_dyulgerov/archive/2011/11/01/xamtilemanager-new-control-in-the-xaml-line-of-business-product-shipped-with-the-11-2-release.aspx says that the XamTileManager is now replacing the xamTilesControl, however 11.2 also has a xamTilesControl.
Is it your guidenance to stop developing with xamTilesControl and to start using xamTileManager? Or are you going to continue to support the xamTilesControl. I ask because the xamTilesControl is the centerpiece to an application I am working on, and I do not want to work with a control that will soon be obsolete.
Please advise.
Thanks,
Mike Malter
Hello Mike,
I have been looking into your enquiry and in order to clarify things around retiring a control I can suggest you read through this blog post: http://blogs.infragistics.com/blogs/jason_beres/archive/2011/11/10/important-product-changes-and-control-retirements-in-2011-2.aspx .
Even though we will continue supporting the XamTilesControl and fixing any arisen issue for it we do suggest that you transition to it successor the XamTilesManager as the XamTilesControl will be soon obsolete in terms of improving its functionality.
Please let me know if I can elaborate my answer. Looking forward to hearing from you.
Is there going to be a separate thread for XamTileManager under Layout? I have a question about how to apply the theme since the helper control is not available to configure the XamTileManager like in the XamTilesControl.
Thanks.
I have been looking into this as well, however since there is no way to use a theme for the XamTilesManager. The XamTileControl as a WPF control was designed to use the WPF themes, whereas the XamTilesManger is a cross platform control, meaning it will be included in both SL and WPF packages. This is why it cannot take advantage of the theming.
Please let me know if you require any further clarification on the matter.
Petar,
First, thank you for taking the time to clear up this issue for me.
From my perspective it is a very poor value for me to have you guys dumb down WPF controls so they will be available for Silverlight. In addition to taking something of value away, you have also diminished the rest of your WPF library.
If we have an application that uses the xamTileManager along with your other WPF controls (which we are doing), we cannot use themes in the other WPF controls the way we could previously, because that look and feel might not be available to the xamTileManager.
Cross platform controls is a great concept and my two cents about it is that when you implement it, everyone should be better off, which is not the case here.
My own preference is for a kick-ass WPF library and I don't care one whit about cross compability at the expense of creating insanely great applications.
Thank you,
Mike
Hi Mike,
I see what you mean. I am going to contact our product management team on your behalf, to see if a theme merging functionality is considered at this time.
I’ll update you in due time.
Thank you very much, please let me know what they say.
This issue came up in a client meeting yesterday when we were looking at the differences between the two controls, xamTilesControl and the xamTileManager. They were disappointed that the tiles under the xamTileManager did not look as nice as the ones with xamTilesControl because of the lack of theming.
We do have a graphic artist assigned to the project, and we could have her to manually design a theme to emulate the Generic theme, but that will be a lot of hours dedicated to that task and it would be good to not have hidden costs crop up because of the blending of the two controls.
I turns out that this matter is not yet decided upon. Currently our Product Management team is working on a possible suggested approach for these kind of situations and when such is chosen it will be published as a blog post. At this point I can suggest you keep track of our community site: http://forums.infragistics.com/blogs/default.aspx to see if anything of interest gets published.
Please let me know if I can be of any further assistance whatsoever.