What's New in v2008 vol 3
Table of Contents
All Developer Express .NET technologies can be purchased separately or as part of our DXperience Subscription program. For more information on available subscriptions and a complete list of products included within them, please visit the following page. http://www.devexpress.com/Subscriptions/DXperience/
New ASP.NET Controls
Gauge Control for ASP.NET
With the release of v2008 vol 3, DXperience includes an ASP.NET-AJAX control allowing you to display gauges and digital dashboards in your web based applications. The feature set is nearly identical to that of our WinForms Gauge Control - offering ASP.NET developers over 130 ready-to-use gauge presets.
Blog: Gauge controls hit the web
Filter Editor Control for ASP.NET (Criteria Builder)
Creating an easy-to-use filtering UI is crucial for those needing to deliver solutions that must retrieve data using complex filter conditions. In general, data-aware controls only allow a single condition per field or don't provide comprehensive filter condition lists. As such, if you want to allow your end-users to filter data without any limitations, you have two solutions, each with its own disadvantages. The first is force users to provide a filter string by entering it into a memo editor, which they aren't always capable of doing. The second of course is to provide patches to your application each time specifications change.
The new DevExpress ASP.NET Filter Editor was specifically designed to address these issues. It does not require any SQL syntax and doesn't have any limitations regarding filter condition complexity. To make filtering even easier for end-users, this control automatically suggests conditions and possible filter values for each individual field. 
ASPxGridView end-users can also take advantage of the grid's embedded Filter Editor – via a single click on the control's Filter Bar.
Blog: Introducing the Filter Control For ASP.NET
Video: Introducing The Filter Control For ASP.NET
Data-bound Image Control for ASP.NET
Previously, every time you wanted to display an image from a database, you wrote a pretty standard chunk of code. Basically you needed to make certain that a request containing a record ID would return an image from the corresponding data record. This allowed you to provide a value for the SRC attribute of an IMG tag. This same process was required if you used our ASPxImage control.
With the new ASPxBinaryImage control, you don't have to write a single line of code. Simply specify the data field containing images. Blog: How To Display Images Directly From The Database
Video: ASPxGridView - How To Display Images Direct From The Database
Loading Panel Control for ASP.NET
With this new control, it's extremely easy to notify end-users that a time-consuming operation is in progress and the UI isn't responding at the moment. You can show this panel in any container with just a single line of code and hide it when necessary. Another display option is to make it a modal window and thus restrict access to the entire application. Though this loading panel control can be used for any kind of operation, the most common use is callback visualization. Blog: ASP.NET Loading Panel Introduction: New DevExpress Control
Video: ASPxLoadingPanel Introduction
New WinForms Controls
WinForms Alert Window Control
The XtraBars Suite allows you to build alert windows similar to those used by Microsoft Outlook to indicate that you have new mail in your inbox.
Key features include:
- Automatic fade in and fade out effects.
- Full support for the DevExpress Application Skinning (Theme) engine.
- Built-in Pin and Close buttons that allow end-users to keep an alert window on screen or close it.
- Ability to associate a popup menu with alert windows.
- Custom buttons at the bottom of alert windows.
- Formatting alert windows' text and captions using HTML tags.
- Customizable position of alert windows.
- Sticking alert windows to the screen edges.
- Quick response to clicking an alert window's text by handling an event.
Video: How to Create and Display an Alert Window
Windows Forms Skinning Library
New Skinning Option for Windows Forms Controls
DXperience v2008 vol 3 extends our Skinning (Application Wide Themes) with two additional visual styles. The first is the "Dark Side" offering you another version of our black UI. The Pumpkin skin extends this with Halloween themed images.
For the complete list of skins (application themes) available to you with our WinForms product line, please visit the following page: http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/Controls/WinForms/Skins/ Blog: The Pumpkin Application Skin - Coming Soon to a Theater Near You...
Video: Application Wide Skins
Common Changes Across All ASP.NET Controls
ASP.NET Controls for SharePoint
During the DXperience v2008 vol 3 development cycle, our ASP.NET team invested the resources necessary to enable our controls within SharePoint portals (built with both Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Services 2007). With this release, ALL DevExpress ASP.NET Controls can be integrated into SharePoint pages.
For details on embedding DevExpress ASP.NET AJAX Controls into SharePoint pages, please refer to the following Knowledge Base articles:
Codeless Integration for ASP.NET Grid and HTML Editor
Additionally, we provide SharePoint add-ons allowing codeless integration of our ASP.NET Grid View and HTML Editor controls.
After registration, you can simply navigate to Site Settings to enable DevExpress features and then embed these controls where necessary.
The following codeless integration scenarios are now possible:
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Display SharePoint list data using the ASPxGridView Web Part. (Screenshot)
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Embed an HTML editor into any page as a standalone web part. (Screenshot)
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Use HTML editors to edit data column values in SharePoint lists. (Screenshot)
- In MOSS 2007, use HTML editors to edit text fields.
Section 508 and Web Accessiblity Initiative (WAI) Support
To enable accessibility, ASP.NET controls must obviously generate more code. For instance, many elements must include links simply to allow keyboard navigation. Because of this additional HTML code, accessibility rendering is disabled by default in advanced controls like the ASPxGridView. If you don't need accessibility support in your application, you will still have optimized rendering. If you need Section 508 and WAI compliance, simply toggle a single property to enable it. Blogs: Section 508: Enable Support In ALL DevExpress ASP.NET Controls,
"Section 508 Compliant" Renamed "Accessibility Compliant"
Better Localization Support
We now provide an easier way to localize all built-in dialogs in the HTML Editor, spell checker and all other controls. You need only to write a few lines of code to translate your application's UI into the desired language.
Faster Page Loading
We've combined a series of smaller scripts into larger files so that fewer requests are made to the server, resulting in faster page loading.
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