And here we are with the second surprise for today as mentioned in the earlier post . I'm also glad to inform you that Klik! IconPack, which is our package with 220 unique icon images, is available as of today.

If you look at the above illustration, you'll easily notice that these images are really great looking but also, unlike the other packages in the market, we provide XAML versions of those images except the regular PNG/ICO versions so if you are developing under WPF/SilverLight, you can enjoy the vector format in XAML files for a resolution independent drawing of those images. To have further info, please follow this link : http://www.kliksoft.com/?S=2&SS=20

Well, that's all for today and keep watching this space as we'll have exciting new announcements in the following days as well... 

Finally, I'm happy to inform you the immediate availability of Klik! NavigationLib.Net v1.0 for Windows Forms. This library, as mentioned in earlier posts, contains flavors of navigation oriented components/controls. Some of them are great versions of already known controls such as treeview, breadcrumb, wizard, etc. where some of them are unique to our library such as NLStepNavigator and NLGeoContainer.

It shares the same advanced visual features you see on rest of our products so you can expect great looking controls/components. To have further info, check out the following link : http://www.kliksoft.com/?S=2&SS=19

And this is not the only thing we got for today, watch out for the next post...  

Hello again and here we are back to introduce another exciting product...

So far, 2 key points in our user interface components were rich functionality and state of the art look. When we talk about the look, there is something else which completes the phrase, "state of the art look" and that is icons. So far, all in our sample applications we used an icon set licensed from a 3rd party icon developer which were quite nice. While creating the single products, which will merge into Klik! Windows Forms Library very soon, we noticed that it's not %100 perfect without using good looking icons and thus we decided to create our own icon library which should look like this :

Above you can see the early preview of a few icons from this upcoming library, named Klik! IconPack. We hope to deliver you 200 unique, state of the art icons you can use royalty free in your applications. One difference in our library will be the formats you are going to get. We're not going to only provide ico and png files but also xaml versions, which should allow you to benefit from the resolution independent vector drawing on supported environments (Currently WPF and SilverLight). When it comes to size, you'll also get various sizes between 256x256 to 16x16 pixels.

Currently, our development team is working very closely with our graphic design team to bring the best quality of icons available in the market. The development is going very fast and we expect to release the pack very very soon...

Hope you liked what you saw and see you soon with more exciting news...

While working hard in here about the new products, I just realised that we haven't updated our development blog for some time about what is going on. Please accept my apologies about this. We are ner the completion on Klik! NavigationLib.Net as well as some other products but as the title of this post  implies, let me give you last minute info about Klik! NavigationLib.Net and the most important 2 controls in this library...

NLTreeView, a flexible and great looking treeview control...

One of the important elements in navigation is treeview in lots of applications. The built in .Net treeview helps in most cases but suffers from it's shortcomings as well. To adress these issues, we created a treeview control from scracth which is very flexible and elegant. As you can see from the screenshot, our treeview supports node level visual formatting where you can change the look of the text, image, checbkbox/radiobutton, etc. The images you see in the left side are the signimages and their background can be formatted as well.

In the functional side we introduce virtual node feature where subnodes can be populated when needed. Sub/Parent nodes can be related so when a node is checked, the parent node is immediately affected by this. Checks can be either CheckBoxes or RadioButton as your wish. Full Drag'n'Drop is included as well.

And the best, though all those visual and functional features, the treeview performance is really great.

NLStepNavigator, a new way to navigate through step based actions...

NLStepNavigator is something unique in the market. This control simply holds list of steps and represents them visually on it's area where you can point the actual step or even let the user to select the step to navigate. We mostly use Wizards in these cases but there are situations where this kind of control will look much more elegant.

The control, as you see, is fully loaded with visual features. Each item can have an associated image with it. Items can be ordered in cross order as you see or behind/after the step line. The control also supports vertical orientation besides the horizontail orientation you see in the screenshot.

That's all for now again, hope to meet you again with the release of Klik! NavigationLib.Net and also the introduction of other exciting products...

Here we are back continuing with Part 3 of our intrduction to Klik! NavigationLib.Net for Windows Forms. This time we introduce you another new control, NLWizard...

Wizard interfaces has always been helpfull to create step by step selection dialogs and we all more or less need them in a part of our application. NLWizard helps you in this case with allowing you to create nice looking wizard dialogs within a short amount of time. It's advanced design-time support allows you to add the necessary pages with ease. As the nature of wizards, you also have total control on next-back button logic so you can control advancement on pages after specific actions are done, such as when a selection from a combobox has been made.

I think I don't need to tell you about it's look. It benefits the same advanced visual features as you see in other Klik! Windows Forms Library controls again with style management support. The sample screenshot above should be speaking itself...

That's all for now again and watch out this space for more information about Klik! NavigationLib.Net as well as other product announcements we'll do in the following days...

If you have visited our public forum section, you should already seen the "closed due maintenance" message. We started to receive high amount of spam posts for some time and it has became into a level that it does not only annoy us but the post/forum subscribers as well. Due to this reason we decided to suspend this section for now. We did not decide how to continue about our public forums for now but probably will replace the current software with a new and more robust one to get rid of such problems in the future.

We do apologise for this and you can continue using the regular mail options to contact us for any enquiries...

Just after the initial announcement, we are back with further info about our upcoming new library...

NLGeoContainer, create nice backgrounds with minimal effort

If you are into the video gaming world like me, you already know how futuristic and rich interfaces does each game offer. If you also own XBox 360, you probably have used/seen the new NXE interface introduced on last fall as well. This interface, briefly, shows a lot of animated geometric shapes on the background which looks quite nice.

NLGeoContainer is something influenced from this. Apart from a standard container control, it has GeoItems collection. This collection holds NLGeoItem classes where each item contains details of a gometric shape to be drawn on the control background. One sad thing is that our objects do not support animations, meaning static but this should not prevent enjoying the nice result you'll get like you see above...

Hope you liked it and see you soon with the next post...

It wasn't long that we had released the new major version of Klik! EntryLib.Net but this did not slow us down and instead we are full speed working on new things. This time I'm produd to inform you one of the upcoming products, Klik! NavigationLib.Net for Windows Forms...

As the name implies, this new product will introduce navigation oriented controls/components where some of them will be industry first...

The First Control, NLBreadCrumb

BreadCrumb has become popular after the release of Windows Vista and also started to be used among the applications. Our implementation closely mimics the look and feel you see in original Vista, including tree style items collection, full visual customization including Office 2007, Office 2003, Vista and many other custom styles. Not the quite right time to disclose but you can expect some interoperability with some other controls in the library as well...

That's all for now for the introduction part and see you in the following days with more details...

Yes, it's finally here. We are proud to announce the immediate availability of Klik! EntryLib.Net v2 for Windows Forms. Please also accept our apologies for the delay as it supposed to happen last week but, as people say, better than never...

To celebrate the release, we are also offering free license(s) (Equal amount of purchased licenses) of Klik! StylerLib.Net for every purchase of Klik! EntryLib.Net for a limited time. We think that this should ease the transition from your old interfaces to these beatifull looking componets. It lasts till 28 Februrary of 2009, so hurry up...

At last, let's list some new facts about this new release :

- Optimized drawing routines which causes your forms to load and draw much faster than v1 which will allow you to use the library in any crowded screens.
- New Office 2007 styles with blue, silver and black color schemes. Each scheme is provided in classic and modern form to mimic the latest Office 2007 look.
- New KRichToolTip component provides Office 2007 style tooltips.
- New KFormManager allows you to style your forms, including it's borders, with Office 2007 or any other custom style.
- New ELModalBox component brings the well known ASP.Net modalbox dialogs into the Windows Forms world.
- New ELProgress control allows you to represent your long going processes either in Bar or Circle style, with static and animated options.
- New ELDataGridView enhances the regular DataGridView with advanced visual features.
- Enhanced visual features allow you to draw your texts with glow effects, images with mirror effect, borders with gradiend drawings and more...
- New design-time Qucik Access Menu allows you to reach many common elements from one place such as predefined styles, edit/load/save style actions, specific control/component features such as editing items, etc.
-  Lots of visual/functional improvements over the other available controls/components...

We hope that all of you will like the new features and benefits you get with this new version. See you soon with the next post which will contain news about the upcoming exciting products...

Hello again and welcome back to a new and last edition of What's new on Klik! EntryLib.Net v2 posts. First of all, we welcomed a new year recently so I wish all of you the very best in the new year on behalf of Klik! Software team.

As you might noticed, I mentioned last post at the beginning. It's the last post on these series as we are scheduled to release Klik! EntryLib.Net v2 for Windows Forms at the beginning of the next week. There are only some bits and pieces left to polish the product. We also have some nice additinal surprises with the release which will last for a limited time so stay tuned...

Another first in Windows Forms, ModalBox

If you are familiar with ASP.Net world, ModalBox is something you probably already know. Originally invented to overcome the popup blocking mechanisms, it's now widely used for different purposes such as showing login dialogs, images, etc. While we don't have the mentioned problem in Windows Forms world, it might still be a usefull in some cases.

ELModalBox, is a new component introduced in Klik! EntryLib.Net v2 which mimics the same behavior for Windows Forms. What it simply does is to show a translucent layer on top of the parent control you specified and also allows you to show a content control inside this layer. It's especially usefull to create attractive login screens or some lengthy UI operations such this :

Hope you liked it and see you with the next post, which will be the release of Klik! EntryLib.Net v2 for Windows Forms...