Your feedback counts!
As part of our ongoing commitment to support the needs of our XAF customers, the upcoming v18.1 release will ship with several major features. Many of them are inspired directly by customer feedback!
If you are an active v17.2 subscriber and you’d like to test these new features prior to the official release, please create a private ticket in the Support Center. We will verify your account and provide you with the v18.1 preview installation privately.
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. My colleague Mehul has recently described other benefits of this cooperation in his great post here.
In advance, thank you very much for your help!
New Rich Text Editor Module for WinForms
As you may already know, the DevExpress WinForms Rich Text Editor is part of a powerful word-processing library, allowing you to create, load, modify, print, save and convert rich text documents. In 2018, we will introduce a new XAF property editor based on this control. It will be available for byte array or text properties and will support mail merge.
Earlier, we have already collected community feedback on our initial vision of this new module, to make sure we don’t miss any important use-case scenarios. This time we want you to test our first implementation in your real projects and clarify some new functionality.
To learn more about the new Rich Text Editor module capabilities and for getting-started instructions to empower your WinForms projects with it, please read this knowledge base article.
SVG Icons Support for WinForms
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.
New Lookup Property Editor for ASP.NET WebForms
We will ship a new Web property editor for reference properties — one that is based on the DevExpress ASPxGridLookup. As you may already know, the existing ASPxLookupPropertyEditor relies on the ASPxComboBox and the ASPxPopupControl, and has not evolved much in recent years.
Our main reason to replace the ASPxLookupPropertyEditor is that the new ASPxGridLookup ASP.NET component brings lots of new useful features, including multiple columns, better server mode support, incremental search, filtering, sorting, and others.
To learn more about the new ASPxGridLookupPropertyEditor capabilities and for getting-started instructions to enable it for Web projects, please read this knowledge base article.
Security Diagnostic Tool
We created this new tool to help XAF users understand why access to a certain object and its members is allowed or denied by security permissions. This is also helpful to us, reducing time spent on diagnosing customer issues related to security permissions.
The tool is already available for early testing in v17.2.6+, and you can enable it using the familiar EnableDiagnosticActions option.
To learn more about saving development and maintenance time with this tool, please read this knowledge base article.
