Announcing the Q1 2014 Release of UI for WPF and UI for Silverlight

It’s that time again! It’s time to find out what is new and exciting with the Q1 2014 release of UI for WPF and UI for Silverlight.

RadWordsProcessing and RadSpreadProcessing CTP

UI for WPF welcomes the addition of a couple of new powerful libraries that are joining the suite as a CTP in this release, RadWordsProcessing and RadSpreadProcessing. These libraries have no dependency on any third party software and ship with a comprehensive and easy to use API. With these libraries, you now have the ability to create, load, modify and convert word processing and spreadsheet documents in your application. These libraries are not only functional, they are fast.

Rich content is also supported in the documents that you will use in conjunction with these libraries. RadWordsProcessing has full support for theming, styles, images, tables, hyperlinks, paragraphs, fields, headers, footers and more. RadSpreadProcessing supports formulas, images, theming and styles as well as the support of multiple data formats such as text, numbers, dates and currency.



Some of the most common file formats are supported by these libraries, RadWordsProcessing provides support for *.docx, *.rtf and *.txt file formats, while RadSpreadProcessing supports *.xlsx, *.csv and *.txt file formats.

It’s important to note that these libraries are not available in UI for Silverlight due to the sandboxed nature of Silverlight.

RadSpreadSheet Enhancements

The RadSpreadSheet feature set has grown by leaps and bounds in the Q1 2014 release. First, the addition of Freeze Panes enables you to provide your users with an enhanced user experience. They now have the ability to freeze columns or rows (based on a selection) and continue to scroll through the rest of the document. This feature is especially handy for keeping header columns or summary rows visible so that users never loses context of the data they are viewing. 

The next feature that was added to RadSpreadSheet is image support. Users can include and manipulate images directly in the spreadsheet. Users can resize, move, rotate as well as flip the image interactively within the control. Programmatically you can create an image, set the image source and assign it to a specific cell index. You can also provide offset values to control the positioning of the image within the cell. You are also able to programmatically set the height and width of the image, as well the rotation angle.



Print and Print preview functionality has also been introduced enabling users to distribute their spreadsheet data in hard copy. 

Finally, spreadsheet protection support has been added to the control. The entire document, or certain cells within a document can now be protected from being edited by an end-user, unless of course they have the password to unlock them. This becomes important when you have a standard layout for a document that must not be changed, yet still allow users to enter values into the editable cells. This functionality can come into play when there is an automated process that is used to parse these spreadsheets and expects to find user entered values in specific cells. Find a great example of this functionality in our WPF samples application (pictured below).

RadChartView Enhancements

RadDocking Enhancements