XAF - Access v18.2 Features Today for Early Testing and BONUS for v18.1.6

Your feedback counts!

As part of our ongoing commitment to support the needs of our XAF customers, the upcoming v18.2 release will ship with several major features. Many of them are inspired directly by customer feedback!

If you are an active DevExpress Universal subscriber and would like to test these features prior to its official release, please email our support team at support@devexpress.com or rather create a separate private ticket in the Support Center. With that, we can verify your account and provide you with a v18.2 preview installation privately.

If you are using a trial and want to use these features today, you can purchase a DevExpress Universal license online (this will give you access to early builds such as this CTP). If you own a non-Universal subscription and are ready to upgrade, email us at clientservices@devexpress.com for preferential upgrade pricing.

By providing early build access, we hope to find out whether our new features and solutions address your requirements and issues. Your testing efforts and your feedback help us deliver the best possible final implementation. We have described other benefits of this cooperation in this post.

In advance, thank you very much for your help!

WinForms UI: SVG Icons Support (UPDATE)

One of our primary objectives in 2018 is to improve the appearance of XAF desktop apps on high resolution displays. To achieve this, we will work to replace all default XAF PNG icons with their SVG equivalents (by the end of 2018). First however, we need to ensure that all XAF visual elements support SVG images themselves: menus and navigation elements, the DetailView layout groups and tabs, built-in property editors, form templates, etc.

To check our progress in this regard and to help future development by answering questions from our team, please read this knowledge base article.

Our UI designers have recently provided us with a large collection of SVG images. We’ve integrated them into XAF’s Model Editor, form templates (we also added our new skin selector), property editors, etc. Remaining tasks include: draw icons for various business objects, integrate the DevExpress WinForms Accordion control, update demos, and integrate all new and existing XAF images into the DevExpress.Images library.

ASP.NET UI: Split View layout support (MasterDetailMode = ListAndDetailView)

Mobile UI: New ASP.NET Core Data Service

Existing XAF Mobile UI users are welcome to migrate to our newest server features: How to connect an existing XAF Mobile application to the new ASP.NET Core Data Service (CTP). The new SPA UI will use this server and you can help us release this portion faster by providing feedback.

Do not miss our updated vision for XAF Web & Mobile development – one that’s based on an entirely new SPA driven UI. When this ASP.NET Core and React-based solution matures, it will supersede/replace existing WebForms and Mobile user interfaces.

BONUS: WinForms Office-inspired Word Processing Module is out of CTP in v18.1.6!

Updated documentation

• Non-Persistent Objects - this concept article makes it clearer that NonPersistentObjectSpace cannot handle persistent objects by default. It is important to create and register a persistent Object Space explicitly using the NonPersistentObjectSpace.AdditionalObjectSpaces collection. Refer to the How to: Show Persistent Objects in a Non-Persistent Object's View topic for more information.
• Access the Application Model in Code - this article makes it clearer that UI does not immediately reflect changes made in the Application Model and ways around it. 
• How to: Access Master Detail View and Nested List View Environment - this significantly updated article explains how to use Controllers to access common UI elements (Frames, Controllers, Actions, Objects, etc.) across popular usage scenarios. I strongly recommend it to both new and existing customers to obtain a better understanding of the UI construction process.

Interesting Support Center tickets

• With v18.2,  the design-time Model Editor tool works with Class Library projects using the new Visual Studio 2017 csproj format (T665236);
• We discussed how to add validation rules dynamically (at runtime) so that required properties do not accept nulls, do not exceed length or meet other criteria (T162321);
• The IObjectSpace.Rollback() method signature has been changed to IObjectSpace.Rollback(askConfirmation = true). This allows you to call the Rollback method with a false parameter and suppress rollback confirmation (T133109);
• We discussed that non-persistent POCO marked with the DomainComponentAttribute do not support custom (runtime) members and that they are totally different from Domain Components (DC) despite using the same attribute (T666245);
• An advanced scenario where a customer needed to dynamically localize his extenders for Application Model elements (T665740);
• We discussed a separation of concerns and that the best programming practice is not to couple your data model with the UI (T665693);
• Ways to specify an XAF Property Editor for properties and types individually or globally, statically or dynamically (KA18907);
• We discussed how to manage DetailView field tab order dynamically, in code (T446884);
• A couple of advanced validation scenarios with non-persistent objects in a persistent object's DetailView and the report wizard (T666584 | T666397);
• A couple of scenarios that illustrate how to use the SplashScreenManager component to improve perceivedperformance of your chart and CRUD forms (T666543 | T563780);
• A new KB Article inspired by recent user questions on whether to use XAF with an old frozen or unchangeable database schema and all the business logic in raw SQL, stored procedures (T671224).
  

Find more interesting customer questions and product enhancements for your favorite products in the DevExpress Support Center (expand the "Frameworks (XAF & XPO)" group on the right) and What's New documentation (see resolved issues). 

Other highly rated content

• XPO - Interview with the Team (see how we use XPO internally and how you too can leverage its flexibility and performance within your enterprise)
• XPO - Easy Way to Map a Property to a Read-Only Database Column (v18.2)
• The new Audit Trail Restore feature from Llamachant Framework Modules for XAF (llamachant.com)
• Debugging, Testing and Error Handling
  
• How to measure and improve the application's performance
• XAF | Frequently Asked Questions
• How do I ask a good question? (StackOverflow.com)
• How to create a Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable example (StackOverflow.com)

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