More news form the DevExpress Annual Summit, where we’ve been discussing the WinForms controls. (To be exact, I’m not including the Frameworks, nor charting or reporting in this.)
As I’ve hinted at before, we’ve been making some great strides in implementing a whole slew of minor, yet important, suggestions provided by you, our loyal customers. This will be the major theme for v2009 vol 1: fit and finish, stability, polishing off items the TBD list, and so on.
The XtraGrid is probably the largest recipient of all of this feature love. The team has implemented some great functionality, which we were introduced to in a quick demo. The nicest new bit of UI was for filtering a date column: In the current version the is accomplished with a long list of dates, which you’ll readily admit is an awful way to allow end-users to select a date or a range of dates. For v2009 vol 1 this has been replaced with a pop up that looks like the pop up you get in Windows Explorer when you are trying filter on a date. You get a calendar control and you get a set of simple quick options (“today”, “yesterday”, “last week” and so on so forth). A great boost to the user experience.
For the remainder of the year, we’ve also decided to concentrate on user feedback, especially your suggestions, and solving those. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be any new major pieces of functionality, but that we’re not ready to talk about them at the moment. We have several paths to follow: the aforementioned user feedback, improving the interoperability with our own XAF product, improving the usability of the controls (one of Mark Miller’s tasks at the moment is a review of our own controls for usability issues), and so on.
Stay tuned.
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