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Last week, CodeRush, DevExpress’ productivity tool for Visual Studio was awarded the Jolt award for best Coding Tool by the Dr Dobbs judges. The award undertakes to select the most innovative developer tool (such as editors, IDEs, code analysis tools, and the like) from the last 12 months.

This year, in no small part due to the extensive new features and functionality we’ve introduced in DXv2 – including the unique code duplication detection and consolidation – it was the turn of CodeRush for the top honors. As Robert DelRossi said, “The fact is, CodeRush is so expansive, so well integrated into Visual Studio, so darned useful, that it can be difficult to describe all its benefits. Particularly jolting to us this year was its new duplicate code detection, which deftly spots similar routines and helps you consolidate them into one. More than just simple pattern matching, CodeRush works out code duplication very intelligently.”

That’s what CodeRush is about really: applying code intelligence to help you write, navigate, refactor test, and spot code issues to be more productive and to get your applications done faster.

Congratulations to the team for such great work!

XBAP? Betcha can’t remember what it stands for, let alone use it. The reply to the first point is XML Browser Application, and to the second part frankly not many people do use it.

There are several reasons for the lack of love I suppose. Since it’s a special kind of browser app, it needs to operate in Medium Trust to be the most effective, and yet even IE9 balks at running them (you have to confirm that you really, really want to run this particular app, which kind of defeats the object). The Medium Trust limitation (along with other security limitations) means that we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get round these narrow-scenario restrictions instead of providing broader-scenario features. Even with these workarounds, some of our controls still don’t work in an XBAP environment.

It is equally galling when there are two very well supported channels for creating rich internet applications: ClickOnce and Silverlight. We use ClickOnce ourselves for our internal applications, and it works very well indeed in that environment. And, despite all the doom and gloom and unfounded rumors about where Silverlight is going, it is still the premier method for creating rich-internet applications.

All this is leading to the fact that we have officially retired our XBAP support in 11.2. We recommend using ClickOnce for your WPF applications, or transferring over to Silverlight. Remember with DXv2 we have control parity between WPF and Silverlight.

Yeah, it’s time to break out the exclamation marks! We just released the second major version of our VCL subscription for 2011 and it includes support for Delphi XE2 (both 32-bit and 64-bit) and C++Builder. Since RAD Studio XE2 is the best IDE we’ve seen from Embarcadero, you really have no excuses now.

If you login to your account page on devexpress.com, you’ll be able to download it immediately. Remember: if you have purchased a subscription and it’s active, this major upgrade is free!

As I stated in one of my most recent and (most heavily commented) blog posts, we made the decision to target Silverlight 5 for our Silverlight controls in v2011 vol 2. Now, that may or may not have been the right decision to make, but make it we did. Since Microsoft didn’t release Silverlight 5 until 9 December, two weeks after our release, this meant that our initial release for DXv2 was without one quarter of the platforms we support. This was bad for you, our customers, as well as for us.

All that will be academic pretty soon since we shall be releasing DXperience v2011 vol 2.6 tomorrow morning, Thursday 22 December. This release will contain the full set of Silverlight controls.

I’d like to take this opportunity on behalf of everyone here at DevExpress to wish all our customers and their families the very best of the holiday season and a happy and prosperous New Year.

It goes without saying, perhaps, but you are instrumental to DevExpress’ own success. We just couldn’t do this without you, and we thank you for being on this wild ride with us. Keep buckled in though because 2012 promises to be even more turbulent (WinRT, anyone? How about HTML5 and client-side controls?), but rest assured DevExpress will be alongside, helping out with robust flexible controls, frameworks and tools for your continued success.

Happy Holidays!

We have been working on a pretty amazing release for all of our customers and by now you have seen the depth and breadth of the DXv2 launch. One area that we are particularly proud of is our continuing work to support Silverlight.

As is usual in these situations, there is some good news and some bad news. The good news is that we have been working in close cooperation with Microsoft to fully support Silverlight 5 with this major release and what we've done is pretty amazing. The bad news is that Microsoft is still putting the final touches on Silverlight 5 and it hasn't been released yet (although it is close, we understand).

I'll ask you on behalf of Microsoft to standby for the final release of Silverlight 5. Once it comes out, we'll run our final tests on the released version and publish DXperience Silverlight as quickly as we can. In the meantime, I invite you to enjoy the rest of DXv2 including brand new features for ASP.NET, WinForms, and WPF, as well as CodeRush and our XAF application framework.

UPDATE: Microsoft: No Silverlight 5 release in November from ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley (30-Nov-2011).

Just a quick word to let everyone know that the first beta for the VCL Subscription v2011 vol 2 is now available to those customers who have the full VCL subscription. The email notifying customers of the beta has just gone out.

You can take a look at What’s New here and at the short list of breaking changes here. Depending on the feedback from customers we should be publishing the final release in two to three weeks.

Possibly the feature that has the potential for most undiscovered issues is 64-bit support (yes, I am old enough to have ported a couple of products from 16-bit Delphi 1 to 32-bit Delphi 2 back in the days when we had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to work), so we’d be eager to hear feedback from customers who are going to be targeting 64-bit Delphi XE2 applications.

The beta does not support C++Builder XE2. We have been notified that the compiler/linker issues that were holding us back will be fixed in RAD Studio XE2 Update 3 (to be released any day now, if not already). Once we have the update, we’ll be continuing to compile/link/test our VCL subscription code with C++Builder XE2.

Have fun!

As I may have let slip in my previous blog post, we’re close to releasing DXperience v2011 vol 2. As part of the release we have planned a series of in-depth webinars that will go over some of the new features in this important version. We’re almost ready to update our webinars page but I thought I’d jump in with a sneak peek at what those initial webinars are going to show. I’ve included links to the webinars so you can register for them right now. Seating is limited.

And also … if you read carefully, you’ll be able to glean some information about various new features we haven’t officially talked about yet. Prepare to have your appetite whetted, but note I can’t say any more just yet.

Tuesday, Dec. 6: Touch

Presenter: Mehul Harry (in collaboration with CodeProject)

Description: In this webinar, Mehul Harry will show you how to build next generation touch applications by DevExpress using Windows Forms and ASP.NET.

• Learn how to build Metro-inspired applications
• Learn about new touch support for DevExpress ASP.NET products
• Learn more about what’s inside the latest product release

Thursday, Dec. 8: XAF & XPO

Presenter: Julian Bucknall

Description: In this webinar, Julian Bucknall will demonstrate the latest improvements in XAF and XPO that will accelerate the development of your Line of Business apps.

• See the new Application Server & the middle tier service
• Learn about the improvements to AJAX & performance in XAF's ASP.NET user interface
• Get information about the new Domain Components (DC)

(This webinar will be presented live from the DevExpress Summit.)

Tuesday, Dec. 13: Productivity Accelerated with CodeRush

Presenter: Mark Miller

Description: In this webinar, Mark Miller will demonstrate the latest improvements in CodeRush, released as part of our next generation of tools: DXv2.

• Learn about how duplicate code detection helps you build high quality apps, faster.
• See how to build office inspired applications in minutes or less
• Hear how the latest tools in DXv2 will help you to deliver productivity, accelerated.

Thursday, Dec. 15: Stunning Apps

Presenter: Seth Juarez

Description: In this webinar, Seth Juarez will show how you can build stunning applications by DevExpress.

• See a mundane CRM app brought to life with a new user experience
• Learn how to build stunning user interfaces that delight your users
• Hear an overview of the new tools in DXv2 that help you to build powerful, yet beautiful applications

Hope to see you at one or all of these webinars!

Way back in June, we had a mini-summit with the various team leads discussing the just-released DXperience v2011 vol 1 and whether we wanted to change anything for v2011 vol 2. One of the resounding requests was to move our WinForms and ASP.NET webforms controls to require .NET 3.5 or later. I wrote a blog post immediately afterwards with this news, and the vast proportion of comments on that post supported the move.

(Aside: our WPF and Silverlight products already require Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 so that we can provide the best design-time and run-time functionality. Of course ASP.NET MVC requires Visual Studio 2008 or later and .NET 3.5 or later anyway.)

Now that we’re close to releasing v2011 vol 2, I thought it would be a good idea to remind our WinForms and WebForms customers that this release will only support Visual Studio 2008 or 2010 and only target .NET 3.5 or above. If you are still using Visual Studio 2005 or .NET 2 for those kinds of apps, you should start to make plans to migrate to a later IDE and run-time.

Note that we will continue to publish minor bug-fix releases to the v2011 vol 1 line, just as we did when v2006.3 became the final version to support the original Visual Studio .NET and Visual Studio 2003 (and .NET 1.x). The new features and enhancements for 2011.2 have been written using .NET 3.5 and so they can’t be back-ported to 2011.1.

And no, before you ask, I can’t tell you when we’ll be releasing 2011.2, just that it’s “close”. Everybody here is working extra hard to give you the best release of DXperience we’ve ever provided. Stay tuned!

Just a quick post to say we’re here at DevConnections in Las Vegas showing off our packages, libraries, controls, and tools. Also some hush hush new features on our *cough*touch*cough* screens. If you are here, come by the booth and we’ll show you some sneak peeks, as well as show you how to create stunning full-featured apps that provide a superlative user experience and that you can easily brand with your own look and feel.

In the meantime, here’s what our booth looked like 30 minutes ago. With this size of crowd, we’ll be hoarse before lunchtime!

Today, a post about our upcoming v2011 vol 2 release of our VCL subscription that is short on words and long on images. Which is as it should be since I’m talking about our new skins.

We have ported the following skins from our WinForms skinning library:

• Blueprint;
• DevExpress Dark Style;
• DevExpress Style;
• High Contrast;
• Seven Classic;
• Sharp Plus;
• The Asphalt World;
• VS2010;
• Whiteprint.

Before I show you the example screenshots, take a look at what our VCL Skin Chooser Gallery will now look like in v2011 vol 2 (as with all these images, click to enlarge):

There are three images per skin to show you what the skin will look like. I’ve used ExpressEditors, ExpressQuantumGrid, and ExpressScheduler as representative controls.

Blueprint:

DevExpress Dark Style:

DevExpress Style:

High Contrast:

Seven Classic:

Sharp Plus:

The Asphalt World:

VS2010:

Whiteprint:

And if you’re still reading, remember these skins will be available for all of the Delphi and C++Builder versions we’ll be supporting in v2011 vol 2: Delphi 7, Delphi 2007, Delphi 2010, Delphi XE, Delphi XE2, and C++Builder 2007, C++Builder 2010, C++Builder XE, C++Builder XE2.

For the v2011 vol 2 release, we have implemented some much-requested features (as always, thanks to the customers who voted on these items; your feedback is much appreciated). First of all, here’s the traditional video (click on the image to see the animation) so you have some context:

Now for the enhancements. I’ve added and linked the suggestion ids for more information.

1. The ribbon now automatically adjusts the size of multi-line editors to maximize the number of items/lines displayed (AS11330). By default, the RadioGroup, CheckGroup, Image, Memo, and Rich editors embedded into the Ribbon via TcxBarEditItem will now be automatically resized so that their contents (items or text lines) are fully visible. For backward compatibility, this functionality can be turned off if you prefer the old way this worked. To see the feature in action, watch the "Radio and Check Groups", "Image Editors", and "Multi-line Editors" tab groups in the video.

2. The look and feel of the Microsoft Office check box controls are now properly reproduced in the Ribbon (AS13185). You can now change the position of the check boxes in check box controls embedded into the Ribbon via TcxBarEditItem. By default, newly created check box controls will have their check boxes positioned before the caption. In addition, clicking a check box will immediately change its checked state without moving focus to the control. These improvements can help you closely replicate the appearance and behavior of the check box controls in Microsoft Office. To see the new check boxes in action, watch the Check Boxes tab group in the video.

Recently, there’s been a few developments of note in the mobile space from Microsoft. Let me recap them briefly:

• The Zune hardware has been discontinued. The Zune name lives on as a set of services for mobile music and video.
• Mango (or Windows Phone 7.5) is slowly but surely being downloaded to WP7 phones. Critics are now saying it’s a worthy competitor to Android and iOS.
• Have I mentioned Windows 8 anywhere?
• Even after many promises about providing such support, there is still no support for Windows CE and the ,NET Compact Framework in Visual Studio 2010. It’s even stated as such in MSDN. At this stage, I would even state that such support won’t be provided in VS2011, currently in “Developer Preview” mode.

Er, say what? Yes, as far as we are aware, both by reading links such as the two I gave and by evaluating the subtext, Microsoft don’t want you to continue Windows CE and .NET CF development but would rather you concentrate on Windows Phone apps in Silverlight. If you do want to do such pre-WP7 mobile development, there’s still Visual Studio 2008 and the Windows Mobile 6 SDK, but that’s it.

Consequently, we feel certain that continuing to provide .NET CF support in our Data and XPO libraries is no longer a viable use of our resources, especially given the major changes to the markets we operate in and platforms we support. Quite honestly, we haven’t provided any new functionality for CF for a while and I’m sure that the large majority of our customers don’t even know that it’s there. (I’m the CTO and I was only vaguely aware of its presence.) Nevertheless we expend time and resources in testing it whenever we make changes to our data support. Hence v2011 vol 1.x will be the last version of DXperience that will support data provisioning for CF; v2011 vol 2 will no longer have that support.

What with all this news for our .NET platforms, I wouldn’t want our Delphi customers to feel left out in the cold. So, without further ado, let’s take a look at the new VCL Alert Window control that will debut in v2011 vol 2 later on this year. An Alert Window is a window that appears, usually with some kind of animation (the standard is that it pops up like a piece of toast from a toaster from the bottom left of the screen), to alert the user to some situation.

(Click image for animation.)

Pretty simple in concept and very effective at getting some important information in front of the user.

We’ve provided many options for animation, and you can apply separate options to both the showing and to the hiding of an alert window. These include:

• Animation effect: namely Slide, Fade, Move, and None.
• Pop-up position: either near the Windows notification area or one of the screen corners.
• Animation direction: all four directions are supported: up (“toaster” type), down, left (shown in the video), and right. The animation path depends on the pop-up position, but it’s always either vertical or horizontal.
• Animation time: this allows you to extend or shorten the animation.

We’ve also provided some other options to help you customize the alert windows:

• Capability to display custom buttons in a window’s footer.
• Visibility of caption buttons (there are three: a dropdown menu (currently supporting TPopupMenu, so it can provide pretty much anything you want), pin, and close).
• Auto-snap alert windows to screen edges during drag operations.
• Auto-hide alert windows after a specified time.
• Auto-size alert windows by content (limits are adjustable) or you can specify the exact height and width.
• Limit the number of simultaneously displayed alert windows.
• Skin support (duh!).

All in all, a nice addition to our VCL subscription for v2011 vol 2.

From the nifty and much-requested department, I am pleased to present the new ASP.NET (and MVC!) track bar control, ASPxTrackBar. (You also might possibly have caught a reference to it in passing during our BUILD recap and What’s New webinar last week.)

A track bar (or slider) control essentially comprises three parts: a thumb, a scale, and some UI that helps to increase or decrease the value represented by the thumb on the scale. You can also grab the thumb with the mouse and move it to represent a larger or smaller value. The track bar has the following notable features:

1. The bar can be shown horizontally or vertically. Note that the value on the scale is rendered differently.

2. The user can use the bar either in a normal (or forward) direction or a reversed direction.

3. Not only is the value on the scale rendered differently, but you can specify that the scale labels be highlighted too.

4. The bar comes with a value tooltip. This is shown when the user changes the value of the control, and is animated to show the changes as they occur.

5. Normally we think of track bar as a control for visualizing and changing numeric values. Ours has a special display mode linked to an items collection. The items in the collection define the steps on the scale, and you can specify the label and the tooltip associated with each item. This mode also allows for the items to be loaded from the database.

6. The bar supports ranges. In this mode, the bar has two thumbs, one for the “smaller” value, and one for the “larger” value. The tooltip is changed to show the range selected.

7. The bar has a very flexible method to set the scale. The developer can create a completely different scale, even one that is not symmetrical.

8. The bar is rendered in a two step process. The server renders part of the bar, which is completed on the client side. This has the advantage of a slightly smaller download, with a richer user experience on the client.

To repeat, in case you missed it above: this new track bar control will be available in both ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC for v2011 vol2.