Virtual Keyboard Controls Added To MindFusion WinForms/WPF Packs

MindFusion UI controls suite now includes a virtual keyboard.

MindFusion UI controls suite now includes a virtual keyboard.

Dear MindFusion current and future clients,
Dear FreezePro clients,

MindFusion is pleased to announce that as of April 2016 it has acquired FreezePro Virtual Keyboard components, which will be released as part of MindFusion WinForms/WPF controls suites. We want to use this opportunity to thank all MindFusion and FreezePro clients for the loyalty – you’ve chosen us over multiple competitive products and we believe you are satisfied with your choice.

To please you even more we offer you special prices for upgrading to MindFusion WinForms/WPF pack. You get a 30% discount on the difference between the price of a component’s license you own and the price of the WinForms/WPF pack license you want to buy. MindFusion clients who already own a WinForms/WPF Pack license get the Virtual Keyboard component free of charge.

If you want to use the preferential upgrade prices please send an e-mail to info@mindfusion.eu no later than May 31st, 2016.

If you have technical questions about any of the components please contact MindFusion at support@mindfusion.eu. Use the same email for questions about licensing or transfer of intellectual property rights.

Welcome to the bigger MindFusion family!

MindFusion WPF Pack

MindFusion Chart Control for WinForms, V4.0 Beta

MindFusion is proud to present you the beta version of Charting for WinForms, V4.0. MindFusion has entirely redesigned the control to create the most agile, lean and smart charting tool on the market. Below is a brief synopsis of the new chart for WinForms component.

New data model
Data that should be drawn in charts is read through an interface called Series, whose instances can be assigned to the Series properties of Chart and SeriesRenderer classes. You could implement this interface in your own model classes to avoid duplicating data. The library includes several pre-defined series classes that let you specify data via IList or array objects. For example, BarSeries lets you specify lists of values, inner labels and top labels, and PointSeries lets you specify data as a list of points.

Radar chart with multiple series.

Radar chart with multiple series.

New rendering model
Chart graphics are drawn inside Plot components by SeriesRenderer -derived objects. Each plot can contain multiple series renderers from same or different types. For example, you can draw area, line and bar graphics in same plot by adding AreaRenderer, LineRenderer and BarRenderer objects to its SeriesRenderers collection. Concrete Chart classes automatically generate a series renderer of appropriate type for their Series.

Dashboard
The Dashboard control can contain multiple plots, axes, legends, images, gauges and text blocks arranged in dynamic layout. Individual components can be added to dashboard’s default RootPanel or LayoutPanel containers, or for more complex layouts add intermediary panels such as GridPanel and StackPanel to the default ones.

The new WinForms Chart  has a built-in dashboard control.

The new WinForms Chart has a built-in dashboard control.

Print and export
The Dashboard control and Chart controls that derive from it expose Print and PrintPreview methods for printing on paper. Call the ExportImage and CreateImage methods to generate bitmap image of the dashboard. The ExportPdf method exports the chart to a PDF (Portable Document Format) file. The ExportSvg method exports the chart to an SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) file.

Styling
Values of appearance properties can come from several places in the component hierarchy. SeriesRenderer -derived objects can use attributes from their local SeriesStyle, from plot’s SeriesStyle, or from the *Series properties in current Theme. Component classes use either their local properties or ones defined in the theme. By default, appearance properties in SeriesRenderer and Component classes have null values, which makes the drawing code use values from the theme.

You can download the beta version directly from the link below. The archive file contains the control’s libraries, samples in C# and documentation.

Download Chart for WinForms, V4.0 Beta Version

Your feedback is valuable for us. Please use the forum or e-mail support@mindfusion.eu. to share your opinion, ask questions or submit a problem.

About Chart for WinForms: This is a smart WinForms dashboard control that lets you add the perfect chart or gauge to your application in a few easy steps. The control provides an elegant data model, which supports equally well arrays, xml, any .NET data source, lists or any other data model class, that you create by implementing the Series interface.

MindFusion WinForms Chart boasts an innovative rendering model, where each chart graphics is drawn by its own SeriesRenderer on a Plot. Each Plot supports unlimited number of chart or gauge series of any type. Plots, together with axes, legends, gauges, images, and text blocks can be combined in a Dashboard with the built-in dashboard control. Styling the chart is done on various levels – from appearance properties in each SeriesRenderer to more general settings in the Component classes. The control supports themes and comes with a set of stylish themes, which you can customize as you wish or create new ones from scratch.

Persisting the chart is possible in several ways – printing, export to PDF or to Svg images – all of them performed with a single method call.

The newly designed chart control is offered with unchanged prices and license scheme – check it here.

MindFusion.WPF Pack, 2016.R1

The new release of MindFUsion WPF Control Suite lists many new features, aimed to empower developers to create compelling business applications with even less efforts. The pack also includes new samples and tutorials. Below are the details:

License keys
There is no separate trial build of the control assemblies anymore. Instead, set the LicenseKey property of the controls to disable their evaluation mode and stop displaying trial messages. If your application contains more than one control by MindFusion, you could call MindFusion.Licensing.LicenseManager.AddLicense(key) from application start-up code to specify the key once instead of setting it per each control.

Visual Studio 2015 support
MindFusion Pack for WPF now includes support for Visual Studio 2015. The installer can create VS2015 toolbox palette for the component.

Barcodes
The new BarcodeLabel class allow displaying EAN, UPC or QR barcodes.

BarcodeLabel: QR barcodes

BarcodeLabel: QR barcodes

MindFusion Chart ControlMindFusion.Charting for WPF

Multiple Axes
The chart control enables developers to create unlimited number of axes of each type – X, X2, Y and Y2. Each axis is an instance of the Axis class and has its own set of properties for complete customization – label style, brush, tick length etc. You can set the X and Y axes of each ChartSeries to a series of your choice and thus bind each chart series to different axes, if you wish.

Multiple axes in the WPF chart control.

Multiple axes in the WPF chart control.

Improved Zooming
Selected area with width smaller than MinZoomSpan does not evoke any action in the control. In addition, the new ZoomChanged event fires whenever zoom occurs and provides useful data for the zoom action with its ZoomChangedArgs.

Cross Hair Improvements
The cross hair control has been improved with several new properties, a method and an event. The properties are:

The new CrossHairPosition method returns the current location of the cross hair. For more precise handling of cross hair movements a new event is available – CrossHairPositionChanged.

Greatly Improved 3D Charts
3D charts have received plenty of improvements, new properties and performance optimizations:

  • PointMergeThreshold – The property sets the radius of an area around a given point where no other points are drawn. The result is better performance especially in charts with numerous points, which happen to be close to one another.
  • InterpolationType.None – A new InterpolationType has been added to the InterpolationType, which does not interpolation but adds data directly and connects the points with triangulation.

The SurfaceType enum has been replaced with three bool properties, which makes the API easier to understand and use.

ScatterFaceSize – the property regulates the size of the polygons that build a 3D scatter. Bigger values lead to bigger polygons, which results in faster performance and more rough scatter mesh.

Effect3D.ShaderEffect – the property can be applied to all 3D chart elements, including scatters and performs much faster.

3D surface chart with color map and wire frame.

3D surface chart with color map and wire frame.

Exporting Images
Two new methods have been added for exporting the chart as an image – CreateImage and ExportImage.

Custom Formatting of Labels in Real-time Charts
A new property has been added to the RealTimeChart library – Axis.LabelFormatProvider. Use it to specify custom formatting of numeric labels. If required, you can specify format arguments for your format classes with Axis.LabelFormat.

MindFusion WebForms DiagrammerMindFusion.Diagramming for WPF

Free-form nodes
A FreeFormNode collects all points from users’ mouse or touch input and displays them as node’s outline. To let users draw free-form nodes interactively, set Diagram.Behavior to DrawFreeForms or LinkFreeforms. Use the Points property of FreeFormNode to get or set outline points programmatically. If the Closed property is set, the node is drawn as a closed shape and its interior filled, or otherwise the node is drawn as a poly-line. If the distance between first and last points drawn by user is shorter than Diagram.AutoCloseDistance, the node’s Closed property is automatically set to true . AutoCloseDistance default value is Double.MaxValue , so free-form nodes are always closed.

Wpf Diagram: Free Shapes

Wpf Diagram: Free Shapes

Shape control points
Shape formulas can now be parameterized by associating control points with Shape objects. Each control point is passed to the shape script as a named variable. Apart from the name, you can specify the default, min and max coordinates for each parameter via the ShapeControlPoint constructor, and whether to treat its values as percents or fixed offset.

Resize table columns and rows
Columns and rows of a TableNode can now be resized interactively if its AllowResizeColumns or AllowResizeRows properties are enabled. In order to resize, move the mouse pointer to the border line on column’s right side or row’s bottom side until it shows resize cursor and start dragging. The control raises TableColumnResizing and TableRowResizing events to let you validate new size or prevent resizing some elements.

Barcode nodes
The BarcodeNode class displays EAN, UPC or QR barcodes as node’s content. In-place edit operations let users enter new numeric codes for 1D codes or text strings for QR codes. The barcode format is specified via the Format property, the encoded number or text is set via Content, and color of 1D bars / 2D modules via BarColor.

Barcode diagram nodes

Barcode diagram nodes

Support for Visio stencils
The diagram can now display shapes from stencil files in Visio 2003 XML stencil format (.vsx). To load a stencil file, use an instance of the VisioStencil class. The shapes are displayed in the diagram through VisioNode objects.

ShapeDesigner improvements

  • The ShapeDesigner control supports undo. Call its Undo or Redo methods to respectively undo or redo a change done to the designed shape.
  • ZoomFactor property added to ShapeDesigner. It also supports interactive zoom in/out via mouse wheel.
  • The SelectedElement property exposes the graphic element currently selected in ShapeDesigner canvas. You can bind to its stroke and brush properties to create alternative user interface for editing element attributes.

AnchorPatern improvements

  • The XUnit and YUnit properties allow specifying the coordinates of an AnchorPoint as a fixed offset from the node’s top-left corner rather than in percentage, so that the point position does not change when the node is resized.
  • The AnchorPattern property of Shape class lets you associate anchor points with shape definitions. If a ShapeNode instance does not contain its own AnchorPattern, it will derive the one defined by the node’s Shape.
  • The RowAnchorPattern property lets you specify default AnchorPattern for all table rows.

Map-16x16MindFusion.Mapping for WPF

Zoom control
The ZoomControl class lets user change interactively the current zoom level and scroll position of a MapView. To set it up, add a ZoomControl to the page, place it anywhere over a MapView, and set the control’s Target property to that view. Set the ZoomStep and ScrollStep properties to specify the amount added to view’s zoom level or scroll position by ZoomControl’s buttons.

map-control-zooming

Miscellaneous

  • The new Behavior property lets users select multiple map elements interactively.

WPF Reporting ToolMindFusion.Reporting for WPF

Report Parameters
Parameters can now be added to a report through the new Parameters collection of the Report class. The parameters provide name, description and value and can be of any type, including expression. For more information about parameters, check the Report Parameters topic.

Barcodes
MindFusion.Reporting for WPF reports can now display UPC-A, UPC-E, EAN-8, EAN-13, and QR barcodes. The barcodes are represented by the new Barcode report item.

wpf_barcode_report_items

Schedule ControlMindFusion.Scheduling for WPF

Interactive Recurrence Rescheduling
Recurrences can be rescheduled interactively by holding down the RescheduleRecurrenceKey while dragging a recurrent item. The control tries to preserve the current pattern of the recurrence when possible.

New Theme
A new built-in theme is available in MindFusion.Scheduling for WPF – the Light theme. It is available through the ThemeType enumeration.

The new 'Light' theme

The new ‘Light’ theme

New Members
Several new properties and events have been added to the control:

You can read details about the new features of the pack at the news page on the forum. The trial version is available for direct download from this link:

Download MindFusion.Pack for WPF 2016.R1

About MindFusion.Wpf Pack: A set of advanced WPF components that help you build your business application easy and on time. The tools provide you with a complete set of features to create, edit and render complex flowcharts, charts, diagrams, calendars, schedules, maps and reports. A set of gauges and UI elements is also included. Each component offers various samples, tutorials and detailed documentation. The controls offer simple and intuitive API, completely customizable appearance, numerous input/output options and a rich event set. Each tool has been thoroughly tested to guarantee that you and your application get the high quality and performance you deserve.

You can read more about the capabilities of each component at its features page:

Prices and licenses are explained in details at the buy page.

MindFusion.WinForms Pack, 2016.R1

MindFusion Pack for WinForms, 2016.R1 has been released. Here is an overview of the new features. You can find details about each new feature here.

Visual Studio 2015 support
MindFusion Pack for WinForms now includes support for Visual Studio 2015. The installer can create VS2015 toolbox palette for the components.

Barcodes
The new BarcodeLabel and BarcodePrinter classes allow displaying and printing EAN, UPC or QR barcodes.

BarcodeLabel:  QR barcodes

BarcodeLabel: QR barcodes

MindFusion WebForms DiagrammerMindFusion.Diagramming

Street maps
MapNodes can render street maps in OpenStreetMap format. Call FromXml method of MapContent to load an .osm file.

MindFusion WinForms  Street maps

MindFusion WinForms Street maps

Resize table columns and rows
Columns and rows of a TableNode can now be resized interactively if its AllowResizeColumns or AllowResizeRows properties are enabled. In order to resize, move the mouse pointer to the border line on column’s right side or row’s bottom side until it shows resize cursor and start dragging.

Barcode nodes
The BarcodeNode class displays EAN, UPC or QR barcodes as node’s content. In-place edit operations let users enter new numeric codes for 1D codes or text strings for QR codes.

Miscellaneous

  • Support for .NET 2 has been dropped; the minimum supported .NET framework version now is 3.5.
  • Distribution now includes a set of digitally-signed assemblies.
  • Undo/redo records for in-place edit operations are now created automatically. They are represented by instances of the EditTextCmd class.
  • CompositeNode supports vertical scrolling in EditComponent (only via keyboard).
  • Support for FromPage and ToPage properties of PrinterSettings .
  • CreateBarcodeNode methods added to the Factory class.
  • The BarcodeNodeStyle property of Diagram defines the default appearance of BarcodeNodes.
  • Improved speed when dragging large hierarchies of grouped nodes.
  • ZoomControl can now be used with other components by MindFusion and has been moved to MindFusion.Common.WinForms assembly and namespace.
  • and much more.

Map-16x16MindFusion.Mapping

Street maps
You can render street maps in OpenStreetMap format by adding a StreetMapLayer instance to the MapView. In order to load a street map, create a new StreetMapLayer > object and call its Map‘s LoadFromXml method to load the corresponding *.osm file.

Zoom control
The ZoomControl class lets user change interactively the current zoom level and scroll position of a MapView. To set it up, add a ZoomControl to the form, place it anywhere over a MapView, and set the control’s Target property to that view.

map-control-zooming

Multiple selection
Now it’s possible to select multiple decorations or map shapes by drawing a selection rectangle. To enable that, set the Behavior property to Select. Selected elements are stored in the Selection collection of respective layer objects.

API changes

  • The type of MapElement‘s Label property has been changed from string to Label class. The FontName and FontSize properties have been moved from MapElement to Label.
  • Type of Layers property changed from List to ObservableCollection .

WPF Reporting ToolMindFusion.Reporting

Barcodes
MindFusion.Reporting reports can now display UPC-A, UPC-E, EAN-8, EAN-13, and QR barcodes. The barcodes are represented by the new Barcode report item.

WinForms Reporter: Barcode Report Items

WinForms Reporter: Barcode Report Items

Miscellaneous

WebForms Scheduler by MindFusionMindFusion.Scheduling

Improved List View
The List view can now display an additional header and a footer. To turn them on, set the appropriate flag to the HeaderStyle property of the ListViewSettings class. The FooterFormat and MainHeaderFormat properties let you customize the text in the respective header. The text can also be customized through the CustomizeText event of the Calendar class. The size of the headers can be specified through the MainHeaderSize and FooterSize properties. Interactive Recurrence Rescheduling Recurrences can be rescheduled interactively by holding down the RescheduleRecurrenceKey while dragging a recurrent item. The control tries to preserve the current pattern of the recurrence when possible.

New Theme
A new built-in theme is available in MindFusion.Scheduling – the Light theme. It is available through the ThemeType enumeration.

The new 'Light' theme

The new ‘Light’ theme

New Properties
Several new properties have been added to the control:

Miscellaneous

Spreadsheet-16x16MindFusion.Spreadsheet

Autofiltering
Worksheets now support autofiltering. To enable it, call the AutoFilter method of the CellRange class. To specify autofiltering criteria for individual columns, use the AutoFilter overload.

WinForms Spreadsheet: Auto filtering

Multiple Selection
MindFusion.Spreadsheet now supports selection of multiple cell ranges. Cell ranges can be added to the selection interactively, by holding down the CTRL key while dragging with the mouse, or programmatically, by using one of the new methods of the Selection class: Add, AddRow, and AddColumn.

Miscellaneous

Installer for the latest version can be downloaded at https://www.mindfusion.eu/WinFormsTrial.zip

Updated assemblies are also available as MindFusion.Pack NuGet package.

About MindFusion.WinForms Pack: A set of five WinForms programming components that provide your application with a rich choice of diagramming, charting, scheduling, mapping, reporting and gauge features. The tools are very easy to implement and use. They boast intuitive API and various step-by-step tutorials to get you started. Both online and offline documentation is available.

A sample browser presents you with all the samples for each control to let you easily navigate to what you need. You can check some of the features of each component right now if you look at the online demos:

Visit the features – page of the components for more information about their capabilities:

You can check the prices and licensing scheme here. All components are royalty-free.

Line Chart With Multiple Axes in WPF

A common scenario when building charts is the ability to render multiple series bound to multiple axes, each one with its own scale. To deal with this issue, MindFusion.Charting for WPF control has added support for multiple axes of all types – X, Y, Y2, X2 and in this post we’ll look how to add and customize them and how to create series bound to a given axis.

The sample imitates a production chart, where three different scales measure three different values – work output, capital and energy consumption – all of which presumably participate in producing a single unit of a product. On the right side we have a single Y2 axis, which measures the amount of units produced. The X-axis displays the time scale. Let’s look at the chart elements, one by one.

I. The Y-Axes

The Y-axes, as all axes in the chart are an instance of the Axis class and are added to the appropriate collection property. The Axis class defines all types of useful properties needed to customize an axis. We define the three axes in XAML:

<chart:linechart.yaxes>
    <chart:axescollection>
        <chart:axis minvalue="0" interval="5" maxvalue="60" labelformat="F0" tick="3" title="kWh/day" titlerotationangle="270" labelstroke="Red" titlestroke="Red"></chart:axis>
        <chart:axis minvalue="0" interval="300" maxvalue="2100" title="Capital (USD)" tick="3" titlerotationangle="270" labelstroke="Purple" titlestroke="Purple"></chart:axis>
        <chart:axis minvalue="100" interval="2.5" maxvalue="130" title="Work Productivity (%)" customlabelposition="AutoScalePoints" axiscrossingpoint="100.0" labeltype="CustomText" tick="3" titlerotationangle="270" labelstroke="Green" titlestroke="Green"></chart:axis>
    </chart:axescollection>
</chart:linechart.yaxes>

The property names easily describe what is set: the minimum and maximum values on each of the three axes, the title, the stroke for the labels and the title, the interval and the length of the axis ticks. Let’s note that the type of labels for the last Y-axis is “CustomText” – this means we will specify the labels explicitly rather than allow the control to generate them as with the other two axes – they don’t set a label type and the default value (the auto scale) is rendered.

Here is how we define the labels:

double start = 100.0;

    //130 is the last number at the axis
    while (start <= 130)
    {
        string l = start.ToString("F1") + "%";
        chart.YAxes[2].Labels.Add(l);
        start += 2.5;
    }

II. The Y2 Axis

The Y2-axis is just one and it is entirely declared in XAML:

<chart:linechart.y2axes>
    <chart:axescollection>
        <chart:axis minvalue="0" interval="1000" maxvalue="12000" tick="3" labelformat="F0" titlerotationangle="270" title="Units"></chart:axis>
     </chart:axescollection>
</chart:linechart.y2axes>

The label format is set with the standard .NET numeric strings – in this case it is a floating number without trailing zeros. In this axis, as well in the other Y-axes you might have noticed that we use the TitleRotationAngle property. This property rotates the title label at an arbitrary angle between 0 and 360. In our case we want the label drawn vertically, to conserve space.

III. The Series

The series are created in code. They specify scatter type because we want each series to have markers at data points. The YAxis property specifies the Y-axis, which a given Series is bound to. Finally, we specify the tool tip type because we want to have a tool tip when the mouse hovers a data point.

 LineSeries series0 = new LineSeries();
 series0.YAxis = chart.YAxes[0];
 series0.ScatterType = ScatterType.Square;
 series0.ScatterFills = new BrushCollection() { Brushes.Pink };
 series0.ScatterStrokes = new BrushCollection() { Brushes.Red };
 series0.Strokes = new BrushCollection() { Brushes.Red };
 series0.ToolTipType = ToolTipType.ChartData;

The data is random generated numbers. We use the Axis.XData and Axis.YData properties to set it.

 for (int i = 0; i < 30; i++)
     {
        series0.XData.Add(i * 6);
        data1.Add(rand.NextDouble() * 60.0);     
      }

      data1.Sort();
      series0.YData = new DoubleCollection(data1);
      //don't forget to add the series
      chart.Series.Add(series0);

Last but not least – don’t forget to add the series to the Series collection property of the chart. With that our chart is ready – here is the result:

Charting for WPF: Multiple Axes and Series

Charting for WPF: Multiple Axes and Series

You can download the sample with the chart libraries from here:

WPF Chart With Multiple Axes Sample Download

If you have any questions regarding the chart component use the forum, email or the help desk to contact MindFusion. More information about Charting for WPF, which includes a premium 3D charting library and a Real time charting library optimized to handle huge data sets can be found here.