We all at Developer Express truly believe that Silverlight will be a great platform for business application development. It is still very young and lacks some essential pieces, but even what it has right now provides a lot of power and flexibility and the upcoming Silverlight 3 will move it farther forward. It will bring enhancements in styling, data binding, performance and tooling and will allow us to create exceptional controls that will help you to create exceptional application using this beautiful framework. 2009 is a very important year for Silverlight and for us. Our plans this year will depend a lot on when and what exactly will be done in this space by Microsoft. We hope nobody will be disappointed this year: neither us, nor our customers.
We already have given 2 great free products to Silverlight development community and we will be enhancing them in the future. Quite soon we are going to release an update to AgDataGrid and AgMenu, which includes performance optimizations of the data grid, bug fixes and small enhancements in both products. We are working on documentation for them and plan to release it this year.
In the v2009 vol1 update we are going to release a beta of the professional AgDataGrid - AgDataGrid Pro (the current free version will named AgDataGrid Std). It will be based on the free AgDataGrid and include some major enhancements:
- Filtering support: filter row and column header filter drop down list
- Group row summary
- Several selection modes (by row, by cell)
- Our own in-place editors using our new AgEditors library
In the beginning AgEditors will contain the same types of editors that the free AgDataGrid has right now. In the later updates we are going to add more editors. In general our goal for AgDataGrid Pro is to have a parity with our WPF DXGrid and far exceed standard Silverlight DataGrid. We also would like to hear from you what features you want to see in AgDataGrid.
Last year we released a first beta of our unique product - AgLayoutControl. This year we will continue the innovation it brings to application development. We plan to implement these great features:
- GroupBox integration with the LayoutControl, so you can create dashboard-like applications, spend less time building entry forms and have a lightweight docking solution
- Label for each element placed on the layout control
- Tabbed layout groups
- Automatic TabIndex calculation for the layout control children based on its layout
- Design-time support (after Visual Studio gets live designer for Silverlight - most likely in one of the first public betas of Visual Studio 2010)
We are still going to publish new features of the AgLayoutControl as soon as they are ready, so you don't have to wait for a major update to try them out and provide a feedback, which we are interested in so much.
The idea behind AgLayoutControl is to provide the absolute solution for any layout needs you might have - be it general application layout or entry forms.
Another unique proposition we have is AgRichEdit. It will get an update in v2009 vol1 and we plan to release it as part of v2009 vol2.
We will spend more resources on our ORM tool - AgXPO. There are some interesting ideas we have in mind for it, which will make the development of business applications using Silverlight much easier and faster.
As you can see we plan to deliver some exciting products for Silverlight this year, so stay tuned and we hope you will like what you'll get.