2022
Feb28

Smart PropertyGrid for .Net 6 RC is available

Many of my customers are currently migrating their applications to .Net 6 and it was important to port SPG to this new .Net version. So, I am happy to announce today the availability of SPG for WinForms / .Net 6, for now in a Release Candidate 2 version. Here is what you need to know if you want to use it: SPG is now available through a private NuGet feed. Its URL is viewable in your customer dashboard. The trial will soon be available on nuget.org too. For those who buy the product with the [...]

2022
Feb22

The blog is back to life

It's been almost 10 years since a post was made on this blog. To properly announce the upcoming news, I'm reopening it today. Although this website is now showing its age, I have modernized the display of the articles a bit. As my messages are created in Markdown format, I updated the libraries that process them and use MarkDig on the server side and Marked on the client side in my admin interface. The code blocks are colored with the Prism.js library. As for the RSS feed, it is still valid and [...]

2012
Sep19

New critical updates

The products you love from VisualHint continue to be refined. Starting with version 3.3.0, SPG is compatible with .Net 4.5. Prior to this "fix" SPG would crash because of the new way the IComparer interface works. SFPE has also been touched. While very stable, a recent feedback showed that it could crash when opening the month calendar if the min and max range allowed for the DateTimePicker did not contain the Today date. It is strongly recommended to download and use these versions containing [...]

2012
May28

Important updates

This has been a long time since I last posted here. I'm sorry, I had no time to blog anymore. But last week, there was an important update to both SPG.Net and SFPE.Net so I feel I have to mention it here. My products use 3rd party licensing engine and obfuscation tools from the same company and there was two issues with them: It was not possible to use my .Net 2 assembly on a machine where only .Net 4 is installed. There was a crash in the VS2010 SP1 designer when opening a form containing my [...]

2010
Dec03

Fix to VisualTips from Skybound

Smart PropertyGrid.Net does not use the VisualTips product directly, but the demo sample does. Lately, it was reported an issue (random crashes) with VisualTips if the client application targets .Net 4.0. The solution has now been found and Skybound has published a fix. You will find it here. I remind you that this is an excellent product and it's free. And since we are talking about tooltips, I would like to outline that the latest SPG build contains refactored code for default tooltips. They [...]

2010
Jun15

Discounts, crisis, euro and vacations

Update: the discount is now closed. Starting today, a 30% discount will be applied to all products and renewals (except full site and worldwide licenses). The reason is twofold: The crisis is difficult for everyone and now especially for eurozone customers who suffer from a depreciation of their currency. Lowering my prices is a kind of participation to the recovery effort. This is a medium term decision and I have no firm expiration date. For the shorter term, I will be in vacations from June [...]

2010
Jan29

VisualHint changes its hosting provider ... and more

Starting on this Friday, Jan 29, I have triggered the DNS changes that will make visualhint.com point to its new home. Why this move? So far visualhint.com was a site written in php and hosted at a linux host. I was using the ExpressionEngine CMS to handle the html pages, the dynamic parts like the blog and announcements, the protected downloads and the sales through paypal. I had also a helpdesk system. This was rather flexible but it has 2 drawbacks for me: it is written in php (which is not [...]

2009
May20

A single checkbox for any property…

... or at least for properties that care publishing two standard values. In the real life, you won’t always have a boolean to represent 2-states variables. Sometimes, you may have an arbitrary type, for example a simple class with two static members (something like Breaker.Opened / Breaker.Closed) or the couple null / anything. Welcome the retouched checkbox inplace control to show this property as a single checkbox. The rule is this: if your property is not a boolean, not an enumeration and [...]

2008
Oct14

The calendar is now kryptonized

A few hours after announcing the addition of a totally new MonthCalendar to the DateTimePicker supplied in Smart FieldPackEditor, here is an addon class that will paint the calendar with the Krypton palettes. The effect with the various built-in palettes is very professional and I must congratulate Phil of ComponentFactory for the excellent job he does with the Krypton Toolkit. His product is not only a suite of very polished controls, it is also a library that 3rd party developers can use to [...]

2008
Oct14

A new MonthCalendar for the DateTimePicker and the PropertyGrid

There was a miss in the DateTimePicker. The editor was able to take any CultureInfo to localize the displayed strings but the popup calendar was not, simply because SFPE was still using the Microsoft MonthCalendar which accepts only the culture of the thread. It had to be fixed so I decided to write my own calendar. This choice was also motivated by a second category of customers who use the free Krypton Toolkit API. This framework has no DateTime components (yet). For them I had just to ensure [...]