Wishing everybody a happy holiday and see you all in the new year!

Martin

• Between v3.0 and v4.0, the PanelState property on the DragDockPanel became read-only, due to some toggling issues. This has caused issues with setting the default panel state in XAML. This property has been made writable again.
• Now that DragDockPanel host is an ItemsControl, users could load any object type as an item. However, in v4.0, it was not possible to define a default panel style. A property called DefaultPanelStyle has been added to DragDockPanelHost.
• Since becoming an ItemsControl, the DragDockPanelHost had a number of bugs introduced with adding and removing panels, after they had been moved around. These bugs have now been fixed.

I have also updated the Showcase to contain a release notes section, which will give more details as to what has changed with each release.

See the showcase here.

Get the latest release here.

Enjoy!

Want to get straight to the good stuff?

See the latest showcase here.

Get the latest release binaries and source here.

This release addresses 5 main items:

• Upgrade of Blacklight source and binaries to Silverlight 3
• Addition of new controls – RangeSlider and WatermarkedTextBox– details below
• Upgrade of DragDockPanelHost to be an ItemsControl, allowing full data binding support, and support for hosting elements that are not DragDockPanels.
• Numerous bug fixes, especially with the DragDropPanel controls in both Silverlight and WPF. Some of these fixes did involve some very basic API changing.
• Update of Blacklight Showcase.

Blacklight, with this release is no longer supporting Silverlight 2 – that was sooooo last month. However, nothing has been implemented in this release that takes advantage of new SL3 features, so, the code will still run fine for SL2.

Range Slider

The range slider control is a ‘double headed’ slider control that allows the user to select a range of values. I have used similar controls in a number of projects, but came up with a nice generic implementation here.

Watermarked Text Box

A text box which allows you to place a watermark inside that will display when there is no text, and the control doesn’t have focus.

And finally…

We have plenty of new controls in the pipeline, and future versions will begin to take advantage of the new SL3 capabilities – so stay tuned! Please keep the feedback coming in!

Martin

First off, Blacklight has been a pleasure to work on so far, and I love all the great feedback and ideas the community has been generating. It is, however, something that we do in our ‘spare time’, and as such, we have found that a new release every month has been a stretch, and certainly with the new focus that we have applied to our day jobs, what with the economy, etc...

The good news, though, is we are nearing the end of our financial year, and from July, Blacklight updates will resume. I will definitely be making it one of my commitments for the year.

The format will more likely follow a big release every 3 months, with fixes and patches in between when possible. This will enable the team to deliver a far better quality product.

In the mean time, the discussion boards are full of patches, fixes and improvements to the existing controls, so if you are happy to play with the source, there is a lot there.

Thanks again for supporting the project, and watch this space in July!

The showcase will be updated very shortly for you to see all of the controls in action!

Get the latest release here!

As always, here are the highlights for this release…

BRAND NEW ‘BLACKLIGHT CONNECTED’ CONTROLS

We have focused on providing controls that allow designers to start adding rich data and content to their application, without the need for code. This release sees 3 such controls: LiveSearchListBox, SyndicationFeedListBox and DeepZoomViewer!

Live Search List Box

The Live Search List Box provides Live Search functionality. The XAML below shows how to incorporate this control – no C# required!

The Live Search List Box links to the search text box, and buttons by passing in their names. Simple! Get an application ID from dev.live.com right now to get going!

Syndication Feed List Box

The Syndication Feed List Box makes it very simple to include RSS feeds into your application.

Deep Zoom Viewer

The Deep Zoom Viewer provides a drag and drop control that displays deep zoom images and give you all the interactivity required to navigate around, including mouse wheel support!

OTHER NEW BITS

Animated Expander

The Animated Expander is a control provides the ability to expand and collapse UI elements with an animation.

Updated Showcase Navigation

As more controls became available, we have reshuffled the showcase navigation to make it easier to find the control you are after…

FINALLY…

The project has had a BIG structural overhaul, and some namespace changes. This could result in some breaking changes in you application. Please use the codeplex discussion boards for further assistance.

The overhaul has been necessary to allow WPF and Silverlight to share controls, meaning plenty more controls for WPF too. The list below shows what is available for WPF now..

Thanks again for you patience.

Get the latest stuff from the code plex site here.

See the showcase here.

Martin

Get the controls from here.

See the showcase here.

You can plenty of details on the new features at the Microsoft Health CUI Team Blog.

To summarise though, the key new features are....

Clinical Noting Using Health Language

We have partnered with Health Language to provide an information rich clinical noting environment. The demonstrator now connects to their web service to allow you to encode clinical notes...

Highlighting and Annotating Deep Zoom

One of my favourite new features - you can now highlight areas and add notes to the patient ECG data in Deep Zoom. The really cool part is that when a note disappears off of the screen, a little marker points to where it is to let you know there is something you can't see!

Brand new Show Guide Feature

Clicking on 'Show Guide' in the top right of the application gives a new experience that we think, re-defines help and guidance! :)

Overlays appears over the live application, letting you know what you can do on any screen, and where we have used Microsoft Health CUI Guidance and Controls.

Check out the demonstrator for yourself, read all about all the latest features in detail, or just watch the video below!

Download the video from here.

Get the controls from here.

See the showcase here.

Check out the the new showcase here.

Get the latest release code from here.

Some of the new fully customisable controls and features include...

GLASS BORDER

The glass border give a glossy effect either over the top of content or behind.

PERSPECTIVE SHADOW BORDER

The perspective shadow draws a shadow behind the border giving a feeling of perspective, as if the border is standing upright...

RADIAL SHADOW BORDER

The radial shadow border give the effect that the border and its contents are hovering off of the ground. The shadow width and vertical offset are all customisable enabling you to create a greater sense of depth.

ANIMATED LAYOUT PANEL

Mike Parker has provided his first control to the project - the AnimatedLayoutPanel. This panel allows incredible deep levels of configuration to achieve the exact effect you are looking for. This must be seen... (Thanks Mike!)

LOADING ANIMATION

The cute little control gives you something to display when buffering a video, downloading an image / deep zoom content, waiting on a web service etc. You can also set the content to be what ever you please!

Go check it out at www.codeplex.com/blacklight.

Thanks,

Martin

I have also worked on some improvements to the Drag Dock Panel controls, including being able to dynamically add panels at runtime, and change which side the panels dock on when one is maximised. Check out all of the details of this release below... and check out the new showcase here.

Silverlight Controls

For Silverlight 2, this release introduces 3 new Border controls – Clipping Border, Drop Shadow Border and Inner Glow Border, 2 new text controls – Drop Shadow Text Block and Stroke Text Block (Alpha), a set of control styles, from Dave Crawford, and some improvements to Drag Dock Panel.

Clipping Border

In WPF, each border, panel and content control has a ClipToBounds property. This meant that if anything was placed inside a control that extends outside of the edge, you could tell the control to clip it. Silverlight doesn’t have this property, and code is always required to draw clipping regions around each control you want to clip. This became especially hard with borders and rounded corners.

The clipping border is a border, just like the Silverlight border, that allows you clip the content. Even with a different corner radius on each corner.

Below, shows a border with a rectangle inside, where the content in not clipped.

The clipping border can clip the content as shown below...

Clipping border is at the base of all of the border controls, so all Blacklight borders have a ClipContent property.

Drop Shadow Border

A fairly obvious control, the Drop Shadow Border draws a drop shadow below your main border. This effect is great if you want your border to look as though it is raise off of the page. You can adjust things like the angle of the drop shadow, the distance from the main border, the softness of the shadow (or spread) and the opacity and colour.

Here are some examples I have made...

Outer Glow Border

This feature in v0.1, however, didn’t get a mention here. The Outer Glow border, is similar to the drop shadow border, however, the ‘shadow’ is drawn around all edges, creating more of a glow effect. You can change the glow size, colour and opacity, as well as all the normal border properties like border thickness, corner radius etc.

Inner Glow Border

Just like the outer glow border, however, the glow appears on the inside of the edges. This is a good effect for making a border look as though it has sunk into the page. You can change the glow size, colour and opacity.

The difference here though, is you can choose the glow size for each edge, allowing you to really customise the effect, for example...

There is also a ContentZIndex property, which allows you to chose whether the borders content sits on top of the shadow, or underneath it. (0 for underneath, 1 for on top).

Drop Shadow Text Block

The drop shadow text block is just like a regular text block, with a drop shadow drawn below.

Just like the drop shadow border, you can change the angle, distance, colour and opacity of the shadow.