Xceed today added nearly 30 controls to its WPF product line, bringing the total to over 70. A fully functional trial version of the new product containing these UI controls, Xceed Extended WPF Toolkit Plus, is available for download at xceed.com.
Xceed Extended WPF Toolkit Plus—the commercial version of Xceed’s extremely popular CodePlex project—provides controls and functionalities that both WPF and the original Microsoft WPF Toolkit lack. Its controls improve the programming experience of WPF developers and allow them to produce software that is otherwise much more difficult and time-consuming to create. create. The product also provides priority support.
Xceed’s acquisition of Extended WPF Toolkit and the project’s active development by a seasoned team of programmers and designers benefits developers in two ways. First, the next and subsequent versions of Xceed Extended WPF Toolkit Plus will be more feature-rich, providing additional controls and properties. Second, the Extended WPF Toolkit CodePlex project will continue to evolve at a much faster pace and will be better supported, a positive for the open source community, given that the original Microsoft WPF Toolkit hasn’t changed in over two years.
Xceed Extended WPF Toolkit Plus includes essential controls that are not included in WPF and the WPF Toolkit, such as BusyIndicator, Calculator, various “UpDown” numerical controls, ChildWindow (which takes an entirely different approach than the one in the Silverlight Toolkit), ColorPicker, DateTimePicker, MaskedTextBox, themable MessageBox, PropertyGrid, RichTextBox with enhanced databinding and formatting capabilities, and WatermarkTextBox. Version 1.7 of both the commercial version and the open-source version feature new controls (zoombox and pie controls).
Xceed Extended WPF Toolkit Plus is available through a subscription that delivers much more than just a perpetual license for versions received during the subscription and full C# and XAML source code (including the source of several sample apps). A subscription also includes a year of exceptional services: expert priority support and access to new controls and features exclusive to the Plus edition, as well as bug fixes. Additional years can be added at a discounted price at the time of purchase or before the subscription expires; a new subscription is required after it has expired.
