Crosslight 2.3 Adds Cross Platform Localization Service and Major Stability Improvements

We are truly excited to announce that the ultimate cross-platform development toolset now sports even more features and stability updates. This new service pack update includes a new localizable business template, over 50+ item templates for Visual Studio, dynamic localization service, new template definitions for iOS, major stability updates for Android, support for application-wide single sign-on, and much more.

The Crosslight Project Wizard now includes an additional and noteworthy template, which is the localizable business template. The new localizable business template allows you to change the language of the application dynamically at runtime, thanks to the dynamic localization service. If automatic language is set, when the device’s language is set to the one supported by the application, then the language changes automatically. However, you can also force an application to use a specific language of your choice, regardless of the language setting used by the device. The following screenshots show the improved Crosslight Project Wizard and the running app respectively.

We have also shipped more than 50 templates for Visual Studio, ranging for variety of projects, this includes, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and shared Core project. The templates itself is clear and concise, with instructions inside each template on how to use it. Your development process will be significantly accelerated since you can now quickly add common Crosslight items to your project. Say goodbye to the tedious, error-prone copy and paste.

In addition, Crosslight for Android platform has received major stability improvements, including the support of Xamarin.Android.Support.v4 library, revamped overall lifecycle, elegant rotation handling to ensure that view state is restored without performance degradation, improved tab caching, and reliability of the Android services, such as camera service, location service, social services, and more.

So far, we’ve only touched the surface of what’s revamped in this SP1 release. For a complete list of the updates, make sure you check out the Crosslight 2.3 release notes in our Developer Center page.

All the installers on our site have also been updated to reflect the new bits. Of course, this update is free of charge for customers with existing subscription for Mobile Studio or Premier Studio. Click here to sign in and access your downloads. If you haven’t tried Crosslight today, request a trial now and see how Crosslight transform the way you build cross-platform apps entirely.

Last but not last, we hope you enjoy Crosslight as much as we love building it! Stay tuned for our upcoming video tutorials and hands-on guide to apply these exciting features in your apps!

Cheers,
Nicholas Lie

Intersoft Studio 2013 SP1 Features Visual Studio 2013, IE 11, and Many Major Updates

We are very excited to announce the release of our latest and greatest toolset for .NET development, which have reached SP1 milestone. Our ASP.NET controls are now updated with full Internet Explorer 11 and Visual Studio 2013 support, running on both designer and runtime environment. Project templates for Crosslight are now updated with latest PCL support, as well as Crosslight-enabled navigation drawer controls are now fully supported in both Android and iOS platforms. The Mobile Studio Installer for Mac is also updated to really get you jump quickly on the mobile development train. Read on.

Full Internet Explorer 11 and Visual Studio 2013 Support

Users running Microsoft’s latest internet browser can now rest assured knowing that our controls consisted in WebUI Studio for ASP.NET lineups, such as WebCombo, WebDesktop, WebEssentials, WebGrid, WebInput, WebScheduler, WebTextEditor and WebTreeView are now updated with full Internet Explorer 11 support, as well as support for designer and runtime support in Visual Studio 2013.

Full PCL Support for Visual Studio 2013 and Xamarin Studio on Mac

Since Xamarin announced full PCL support, we have also updated our time-saving templates to fully comply with the latest PCL standard, ensuring smooth operations on all supported IDEs across Windows and Mac: Visual Studio 2012, Visual Studio 2013, Xamarin Studio for Windows and Xamarin Studio for Mac. You can rest assured knowing that your projects will flawlessly support PCL on .NET Framework 4.0 upwards.

Crosslight running on Visual Studio 2012.

Crosslight running on Visual Studio 2013.

Crosslight running on Xamarin Studio for Windows.

Crosslight running on Xamarin Studio for Mac.

New Navigation Drawer Samples

As navigation drawer becomes a standard design pattern for mobile apps, we realize it is necessary to create Crosslight-enabled navigation drawers that runs on two of the world’s most most popular platform: iOS and Android. Designed with intuitive navigation interface that conforms to each platform’s UI guidelines, the navigation drawer is guaranteed to give you greater control over your apps that allows more complex navigation features. Check out our previous post that outlines the Crosslight-enabled navigation drawer experience in detail.

Jump-start Your Development on Mac

Our Mobile Studio installer for Mac now supports streamlined Mobile Studio installation as well as automatic installation of Xamarin platforms. During the installation, Mobile Studio installer now intelligently detects whether Xamarin platforms are installed and completely removes the technical difficulties for you to jump-start native cross-platform mobile development using Crosslight.

If you’re still unsure, we have provided a video that outlines the process clearly and you’ll be wondering why do we even make the video in the first place.

Wrapping Up

As a leading .NET component provider in the industry, we always strive to keep up with the latest Microsoft technologies, providing you with versatile components to speed up your development time so that you can ship your apps faster to market. You can get these exciting features by downloading our latest installer from the account portal. Existing customers will automatically entitled for auto upgrade, whilst if you are interested, contact us at sales@intersoftpt.com or visit our site for complete licensing schemes.

See you on the next post,

Nicholas Lie

WebUI Studio for Visual Studio 2012 is here!

The wait is over – the highly anticipated WebUI Studio 2012 SP1 release is now available for download. Grab your copy here.

As mentioned in my recent posts, the new service pack release includes full support for Visual Studio 2012 which updates all 40+ component designers to adhere the Visual Studio UX guidelines. In addition, this release has been optimized for Windows 8 as well as support for Internet Explorer 10. For details, check out my post here.

Even more, the new service pack ships dozens of new features and major performance improvements to the Silverlight and WPF controls, ranging from the ribbon controls, all variants of selection controls, smoother animation in expandable group box, attribute-based licensing mechanism, and much more. For complete details, make sure you check out the Release Notes document once the service pack is installed successfully.

Help Integration in Visual Studio 2012

In addition to a host of designer-related enhancements, this new release also automatically plug all products documentation into Help Viewer 2.0 which shares the modern Visual Studio interface. The look and feel of the documentation content has been updated as well to share the same metaphor, see the shot below.

Everything you need is here. And whenever you need help, simply press F1 and locate the topics in the new Help Viewer.

More details on Visual Studio 2012

Along with this release, we’re pleased to introduce a new page dedicated to Visual Studio 2012 which contains related information and resources. Check it out at intersoftpt.com/vs2012.

Last but not least, enjoy (Visual + WebUI) Studio 2012! Here’s the download link again in case you missed it.

All the best,
Jimmy

Native Silverlight 5 Support and 100+ Enhancements

Just a month ago, the Silverlight team has finally released the long awaited Silverlight 5. The latest Silverlight release simply signals that the technology is still of interest by huge number of developers. With dozens of exciting features in Silverlight 5 such as full trust support for in-browser apps, vector printing support, 64 bit support and hundreds more, it’s obvious that Silverlight will still be the preferred line-of-business application platform for many years to come.

Ever since Silverlight 5 was released, we’ve been bombarded with emails and forum posts asking when we will upgrade our tools to support it. And I’m pleased to answer that the day is today. You can download WebUI Studio 2011 R2 Service Pack 1 here which is a free upgrade for all existing subscribers.

Speaking about Silverlight 5 support, we shipped not only about “compatibility” support with the Silverlight 5 runtime, but to the extent of “native” Silverlight 5 support where we improved many areas of our components to leverage the new features introduced in Silverlight 5. Once you installed the service pack, noticed that ClientUI assemblies for Silverlight 5 are now available in the separate folder.

Among the most significant enhancements is the vector printing support. All document viewer lineup in ClientUI – such as Fixed Document Viewer, XPS Document Viewer, Flow Document Viewer, and SQL Report Viewer – now automatically leverage vector printing by default, and fallback to the bitmap printing if unsupported by the printer.

The Flow Document Viewer has been significantly enhanced to support the improved graphic stack introduced in Silverlight 5 which enables the images to dynamically loaded in different UI thread while at the same time maintaining the layout consistency.

Upgrading your existing project to Silverlight 5 is as easy as few clicks away – thanks to the seamless integration to the Silverlight 5 developer tools. Simply bring up the project properties and change the Silverlight target version to Silverlight 5. Once you ok’ed the changes, Visual Studio will refresh the project’s references and automatically pick up the Silverlight 5 version of ClientUI assemblies. To ensure that your project is now upgraded, select a ClientUI assembly and press F4 to see the assembly properties, as shown in the following figure.

Note that ClientUI supports side-by-side development with Silverlight 3, Silverlight 4 and Silverlight 5 – by far the industry’s most comprehensive toolset for Silverlight development.

Another major effort that our team have put in this latest release is a brand-new wizard for Silverlight and WPF templates. Previously, some ClientUI templates depend on the installed Silverlight version. Several templates also have to be made separately to target different version of WCF RIA Services (i.e., RTM, SP1 and SP2). In this latest release, the ClientUI project templates no longer depend on the Silverlight version. A single project template now works flawlessly regardless of the WCF RIA Services, see the shot below.

For data-driven project templates, you can now choose the target Silverlight version when creating a new project, see the shot below.

In addition, the service pack also throws in nearly 100+ enhancements and fixes across all Silverlight, WPF and ASP.NET controls. To see the complete list, please download the release notes here.

So what’re you waiting for? Kick-off the new year with this exciting release, and build some amazing apps fast.

Note: Existing customers can also download the service pack from Intersoft Developer Network, under My Components link.

Best,
Jimmy Petrus

WebUI Studio 2010 SP1 Is Here

We’re pleased to announce the immediate availability of WebUI Studio 2010 service pack 1, the most significant updates to our flagship suite since its initial release few months ago. The new service pack delivers hundreds of enhancements and dozens of fixes across all product lineups – thanks to our customers for the continuous support and feedback. Click here to view the complete release notes for WebUI Studio 2010 service pack 1.

All existing customers and prospects are highly recommended to download the new service pack for increased performance, reliability and stability. Click here to download the latest product installer.

Over 5000 Documentation Topics for Silverlight and WPF – Delivered!

The new release also includes a comprehensive MSDN-style product documentation for the Silverlight and WPF lineups, packing in over 150 new walkthroughs and how-to topics, and over 80 conceptual topics that cover fundamental topics such as MVVM pattern development, application framework, navigation framework, and much more – not to mention the documentation for over 4500 classes, types and members at the class library level along with complimentary examples and remarks!

Accessing the new help content is easy and straightforward – here’s how.

• From Windows program group.
  The new ClientUI documentation is now built upon Microsoft’s latest help viewer technology. This allows you to read the documentation with your favorite browser. Simply point and click the shortcut shown in the following screenshot, which opens a web browser with the help content ready. 
• From Visual Studio.
  Having a hard time locating the help content for a particular property or class? With the new ClientUI help system, that’s a thing of the past! Now, you can simply place your cursor to a property or class in your XAML within the code editor and hit F1 key to bring up the help content for that particular member. The same contextual help is also applicable to the selection in the property window and class view, thanks to the seamless integration with the Visual Studio’s help viewer library. 

I think it’s noteworthy to mention that all the topics in the ClientUI documentation have passed our rigorous three-level review: technical review, content and formatting review, and US English proof-read review. Of course, what’s matter the most in such a product documentation is always the content. The content of the ClientUI documentation itself is arranged in the way that lets you locate certain help content easily and intuitively. Let’s tour the documentation highlights.

Getting Started

This is the best place to get started with ClientUI. The topics are ranging from introduction, system requirements, development environment overview, and quick walkthroughs for beginners.

Application Development

Get enough with the introduction? Jump straight to the application development using ClientUI. This section includes several interesting topics that guide you to work with Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend 4, as well as describing the designer features supported in ClientUI.

ClientUI Fundamentals

The MVVM pattern, navigation framework and the load-on-demand composite application framework are three of the most interesting fundamental architecture in ClientUI – which are also the most frequently asked questions in our community forum since the RTM release two months ago. Satisfy your hunger on the architectural and fundamental topics – all centralized in this section from core application unity, to commanding concept, to drag and drop and user experiences, and more.

Licensing

Browse to this section when you’re ready to deploy your ClientUI-powered applications, or when you have other difficulties in the development licensing which is very unlikely.

Walkthroughs

And last but not least, here is the place where you can find all the walkthroughs and how-to topics you need to get up to speed with Silverlight and WPF development using ClientUI. Despite of the huge list in number, every walkthrough is written very thoroughly with step-by-step details, accompanied with screenshots and XAML examples so you would never get lost. You definitely have to read it to see the details yourself.

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What’s Next

What makes us even busier in the past few months is that we are going to release our new support site with hundreds of fresh content (of course!) in just the next couple days. It will include dozens of new tutorial videos particularly for the Silverlight and WPF lineups. The new support site will also unveil our new online documentation browser that sports a blazing fast tree navigation with auto sync TOC, as well as featuring Windows 7-style address bar and on-the-fly searching. Sneak preview it in the following screenshot.

When the new support site is available, I will blog more details about the new resources that you can play immediately, as well as aggregating a high level overview of the ClientUI documentation for easy reference.

Again, click here to learn the enhancements and fixes implemented in WebUI Studio 2010 service pack 1, and here to download the latest product installer.

We hope you enjoyed the new release! Stay tuned for the next announcement.

All the best,
Jimmy