It is considered a good interface design practice to make it easy for the user to provide input.  One of the ways to do this is to anticipate what the user is trying to enter and provide them with options or complete the entry for them.  For example, if I type in a popular browser a web address containing the letters "tel" I will see several options made available to me, as shown below. The key is to have the ability to make a reasonable guess at what the user is trying to input.  This is particularly helpful for values that...

Today I decided to break the lengthy silence on my blog by writing about two of the features that will be included in the Q3 SP1 (mid-December), namely labels in 3D and labels formatting. Here are a couple of screenshots:   As the screenshots clearly show, the labels are simple 2D controls instead of 3D objects. As I wrote in an earlier blog post, that guarantees the labels will be readable at all times, and not hidden by other 3D objects (always on top of the Viewport). If you are interested in the implementation details, you can refer to the aforementioned blog...

When we have a running application and we want to show a modal dialog window what we generally do is more or less the following: var window = new MyDialogWindow(); window.ShowDialog();   Doing that works great - the dialog window shows and is modal. It has just one tiny defect - if you switch from the running application to another one (i. e. using Alt + Tab) and then come back to the running app the modal dialog window is not showing and the app is inactive. The solution - just assign the parent window to the Owner property of your modal dialog window :  var window = new MyDialogWindow(); window.Owner = this;  window.ShowDialog(); ...

I'm happy to announce that with our next service pack you will be able to bind the grid completely codeless to ADO.NET DataService. With this great new feature you will get full REST support for paging, sorting and filtering without writing any code: pure JSON response: and all operations are applied directly to the data-base server: [Live | Download]...

In some cases you might want to hide duplicates in a single "column" - for example if you group by a field, it would be nice to present the data in a more clean way.