RadRichTextBox for WPF CTP

We are happy to announce the first CTP version of the latest addition to our WPF suite: RadRichTextBox.

RadRichTextBox was initially developed in Silverlight, but in response to numerous customer requests and following the tradition of keeping our WPF and Silverlight suites in sync, we are doing our best to provide a WPF version as soon as possible – so expect the first beta around the end of February, and a public release along with Q1 2011 – around the end of March 2011.

You can check out our ClickOnce demo (for .NET 4.0 or for .NET 3.5 SP1) – assure you are using browser that supports it (for example Internet Explorer) – or download the bits from your Telerik account. As always, any feedback is welcome and will be highly appreciated – now is the right moment to express your thoughts or ask for a feature, so that we have enough time for reaction before the official release.

Quick overview of the main features (which are pretty much the same as in its Silverlight counterpart):

• Text editing and formatting – bold; italic; various underline styles; strike-through; usage of all available system fonts; text and background color; bullet and numbered lists; paragraph alignment, indentation and background color; formatting symbols; inline images; hyperlinks; support for embedding WPF UI elements; line and page-breaks; predefined and custom page sizes and margins; ruler for changing section margins and table column sizes; built-in pop-ups for applying formatting;

• Import/Export from/to various formats – import from internal XAML format, HTML, Docx and plain text; export to all of the above and PDF; RTF import/export is on its way – hopefully in Q1 2011;
• Printing
• Table support – API allows insertion of tables, defining the number of rows and columns, inserting additional ones or deleting them; setting table and cell borders with different colors and patterns; auto-fit/fixed column width. Table editing UI is also included;

• RadRichTextBoxRibbonUI – this component will automatically create full-featured editing UI based on RadRibbonBar (in XAML only) right after you drop it on designer surface;
• Spellchecking – automatically underlines all misspelled words; right-clicking provides correction options in context menu; spellchecking dialog; custom dictionaries support;

• Multi-region selection and editing – support for selecting more than one parts of the document simultaneously. This is particularly useful, as most operations are performed on the selection;
• Rich-text clipboard – allows copy/paste from Word, OpenOffice etc.;
• Multi-level undo/redo
• Layout support – paged (print) layout – with arbitrary page size; flow layout – automatically rearrange the document’s content to fit the available space;
• UI virtualization – to keep performance optimal, Telerik RichTextBox control utilizes the concept of UI virtualization. UI elements such as Canvases and TextBlocks, which are used when showing the contents of the document, are only created for the visible elements in the editor. This enables the RichTextBox control to easily handle large documents, i.e. 500+ Microsoft Word pages (A4 Format);
• Control API – rich API allows you to access the document structure and the layout model, to edit the document, control the caret position and format the text;
• Context menu – fully extensible built-in context menu allowing to format the text, change misspelled words, add hyperlinks, copy/cut/paste text, insert paragraphs and edit tables;
• Floating Menus – a SelectionMiniToolBar appears upon selection and allows quick formatting of the selected text;
• Additional UI components – more dialogs: find/replace, table borders, table properties, insert table, insert hyperlink, insert symbol dialogs are provided out-of-the-box, but the user can define and employ their own implementations.
• Extensibility - last but not least, high level of extensibility is guaranteed by MEF (MS Managed Extensibility Framework). Various parts of RadRichTextBox, like FormatProviders, ContextMenu, Toolbars, Dialogs, Spellchecking and Dictionaries can be extended or fully replaced following MEF rules.