ComponentOne Studio Enterprise Roadmap: What's Coming in 2018 for .NET UI Controls

January 10 2018

The general trend in the .NET world is interoperability, and we at GrapeCity see this continuing in 2018. The examples out there give a clear guidance for the future: whether it's .NET standard, ASP.NET Core, Xamarin or the planned XAML standard, interoperability is the key for all applications. Keeping this central to our future product planning, we'll continue to innovate and strengthen existing products.

WinForms UI Controls

WinForms remains strong as a platform for desktop business applications. We plan to add new controls to the platform and deep features across all controls. Most of these features are requested by our existing customers. We'll continue making UI improvements to all controls as we strive to keep the studio modern and fresh.

Here's a look at upcoming controls:

MultiSelect

This drop-down control includes a checkbox next to each item in the drop-down list. Selected items are displayed as tags in the text area.

MultiAutoComplete

This auto-complete control supports multiple-item selection from a filtered list of items. Selected items are displayed as tags in the text area.

Dashboard Layout Control

The dashboard layout control allows users to dynamically place containers (tiles) on a surface and quickly build dynamic dashboards. These containers can host arbitrary controls like grids, charts, and maps. The containers can be dragged, dropped, and resized inside the parent container.

DataFilter and Slicer

C1DataFilter combines a slicer and intelligent filter UI, alowing users to filter data based on criteria. It can be bound to any data-aware control or a data model and multiple conditional filtering could be applied.

BulletGraph

BulletGraphs are a nice visualization to display targets, good and bad values. These graphs are heavily used on dashboards and information screens.

ASP.NET MVC BulletGraph

Sparklines

Sparklines are small line, bar, or pie charts that can be displayed inside a table, a grid cell, or within a text field to display numerical information or show trends.

FlexGrid extensions

Grouping Panel: This will allow runtime grouping by end-user.
Sparkline Cells: Numerical information and trends can be graphically displayed in cells using sparklines.

Maps

We'll be adding the ability to measure distance or get coordinates of specific points, along with some UI and theme updates.

FlexChart

We'll continue to improve existing features' ease of use and available customizations. We'll add more domain-specific chart types and a performance benchmark sample, as well.

FinancialCharts

Point and Figure charts will include out-of-the-box support for trend lines and an option for box scaling. We'll also be adding more technical indicators and overlays, including Ichimoku, Elliott waves, and TrueRange.

WPF and UWP UI Controls

WPF and UWP remain popular platforms for desktop business applications. As Xamarin and .NET Standard continues to gain popularity, we’ll be making some changes to ensure that code becomes more shareable between platforms. With XAML Standard looming, we can expect more consolidation between the WPF, UWP, and Xamarin.

MultiSelect

This drop-down control includes a checkbox next to each item in the drop-down list. Selected items are displayed as tags in the text area.

MultiAutoComplete

This auto-complete control supports multiple-item selection from a filtered list of items. Selected items are displayed as tags in the text area.

.NET Standard Non-UI Libraries

We’ll work on updating our Non-UI libraries so that they become even more shareable between platforms. We plan to review and enhance our BarCodes, PDFDocumentSource, and Excel libraries over the next year.

New Project Templates

We’ve steadily been adding new project templates as we think they’re a great way for users to get start quickly. We’ll continue to review and enhance our templates going forward, and we’ll have a theme-specific template in our next release.

FlexChart

Expect similar improvements for WPF and UWP to what we have coming for WinForms. These enhancements include:

Improve ease of use and customizations of existing features like Axes, DataLabels, Legends
This includes intelligent behavior to manage overlapping DataLabels and AxisLabels.
Add the ability to group AxisLabels
Add more domain specific chart types.
Performance benchmark sample for FlexChart

ASP.NET MVC UI Controls

ASP.NET Core is gaining popularity with every passing day, and with the release of .NET Core 2.0, more APIs have been added, making the platform a powerful choice for developing industrial applications. In 2018, we'll continue adding new data visualization and business controls that will empower our users to create applications for the web and mobile.

Point and Figure Charting

The Point and Figure chart, already available in WinForms and XAML, will be added to MVC. Point and Figure chart consists of columns of X's and O's that represent filtered price movements. X-Columns represent rising prices and O-Columns represent falling prices.

Point and Figure Chart

Gantt Chart

This project management bar chart includes date ranges for scheduling, dependencies, and prerequisites.

Server side ODataCollectionView

The server-side ODataCollectionView will enable controls to bind to the ODATA service, and it's also possible to apply server-side sorting and filtering in controls that bind to the ODATA service.

Scaffolder, project, and item templates for Razor Pages

We've been adding templates to support the quick creation of MVC projects, pre-configured with C1 MVC Controls. This year we'll add Project and Item templates for RazorPages in ASP.NET Core MVC.

FlexSheet

Table support will be added to FlexSheet, so you'll be able to add, remove, and format tables through APIs on client and server-side.

Dashboard Layout Control

The dashboard layout control allows users to dynamically place containers (tiles) on a surface. These containers can host arbitrary controls like grids, charts, and maps. The containers can be dragged, dropped, and resized inside the parent container.