Version History
v2011 vol 2
Image Slider - The New XtraEditors Control
DXperience v2011 vol 2 ships with a new Image Slider Control – for straightforward navigation of image collections. Image navigation is managed via the 'Forward' and 'Back' buttons (invisible when not hovered). Sliding from one image to another is accompanied by an animation which can take as long as you desire. The following video shows the Image Slider in action:
The Image Slider Control ships with touch-input device support.
PictureEdit - Zooming and Scrolling Big Images
With this release, the PictureEdit control provides a scrolling feature that makes it easy to view large images. You can enable built-in scroll bars and also enable image scrolling via mouse drag events:
New zoom options allow you to zoom images via the CTRL+Mouse Wheel shortcut and via a context menu:
Progress Panel
You can indicate the progress of lengthy operations in a number of ways. One option is to use the Progress Bar or Marquee Progress Bar controls. Another is our newly introduced Progress Panel control:
Once the control is added to the form, continuous image animation automatically starts. For each skin, the Progress Panel has its own unique appearance:
If you want to display a Progress Panel as a separate window, you can use the Wait Form provided by the new Splash Screen Manager component.
Shared Image Collection
Image collections store images to be displayed in various controls and components within a form. For example, they can store icons for Bar or Ribbon items, or Grid and Tree List column headers. The new static Shared Image Collection is invaluable when you want to share the same images between controls placed across multiple forms.
If you need to use the same image across multiple forms, there is now no need to duplicate images by creating separate image collections within each individual form. Instead, use a single Shared Image Collection to store images that need to be accessible within you project.
You can load images into the collection from disk or the project's resources. Different image sizes can be added.
The Shared Image Collection does not resize added images, and as such, you can store different image sizes in the collection.
The Shared Image Collection supports an image synchronization feature. You can add images into the collection and the new images will be instantly accessible within all forms where the static collection is used. If you add an image to the collection from the project's resources and then modify this image, changes will be automatically reflected by the collection and by all linked controls.
Miscellaneous Enhancements
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ToolTips - Native Paint Style Support - Standard tooltips for your controls will be painted using native Windows paint mechanisms. As such, custom tooltips will be identical to tooltips built into the Microsoft Windows® OS.
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Marquee Progress Bar - You can temporarily pause the running progress of the Marquee Progress Bar and then resume running the progress from the position where it was stopped.
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Image Collection - This component allows you to load images into the collection from the project's resources. If you modify an image in the project's resources, the collection will automatically reflect changes.
Splash Screen Manager
Adding splash screens to WinForms projects has never been easier with the SplashScreenManager Component. With two simple steps, you can display a splash screen when your app starts without writing any code.
The Splash Screen Manager allows you to display a custom image as your splash screen and with image transparency support, your splash screen may be any irregular form and contain shadows when required:
Splash screens are fully customizable. You can modify default splash screens by changing the default image, default control layout, adding custom controls, etc.
Automatic display mode is one of two options when using splash screens. You can also control the display of a splash screen manually from code - display and close it when required, and send custom commands to it.
In addition to splash screens displayed on form start up, the Splash Screen Manager helps you create Wait Forms with progress indicators:
Fully customizable, Wait Forms are useful when displaying information windows with progress indicators at any time during the application run. For each skin, the Wait Form has its own unique appearance.
A number of DevExpress controls allow you to format the display text using
Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). For instance, you can use HTML tags to
format text in a Label Control, the Grid Control's column header, Alert
Windows, etc. With this release, support for the Image tag has been added.
This tag allows you to easily embed images into text, at any position:
You can display multiple images within the text whenever required:
HTML text formatting has been expanded to the following controls:
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XtraGrid Control - XtraGrid Control - In addition to the previously supported column
header, you can now use HTML tags to format text in group rows and cells
(when text editing is turned off).
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XtraEditors - XtraEditors - For all text button editors you can use HTML tags to
format edit values (when editing via an edit box is disabled). You can also
format text in the editor's embedded buttons when needed.
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ListBoxControl, CheckedListBoxControl, ComboBoxEdit, ImageComboBoxEdit and CheckedComboBoxEdit controls - You can use the HTML formatting feature to format control items.
New Metro-style Skin
DXperience v2011 vol 2 ships with a new skin - Metropolis, allowing you to introduce a Metro inspired look and feel to your WinForms application: