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...

Hello and welcome back to the second part of what's new in Klik! EntryLib.Net. In this part we continue to give further clues about visual enhancemens as well as representing another new control...

Give me more pretty interfaces...

In the first part we had informed you about the drawing speed improvements and new Office 2007 styles. Let's continue to look into the enhancements on drawing different parts of the controls :

- BackgroundImageStyle / ForeGroundImageStyle: Background and Foreground Image classes now have 2 additional image effects added. The first one is called Mirror (Reflection is another common name for it). What it simply does is that it creates a reflection effect of your image which looks incredibly cool and very common nowadays. The second one is called Fade and what it does is to slowly fade your image from it's top to bottom.

- BorderStyle : Borders can now be painted using LinearGradient brushes, where you could only use solid colors in the last version.

- TextStyle : A new text type has been introduced, which is called Glow. When activated, it creates a glow effect around the drawn text with your choosen color.

A nicer way to list your data, ELDataGridView...

Since it's introduction in .Net v2, DataGridView was one of my favorite list controls, despite it's performance problems when you try to display large amount of data. At this point, let me also inform you that our list controls library is coming soon as well, infact just after Klik! EntryLib.Net v2, which will include a nice grid alike control in it .

Thankfully, DataGridView is flexible enough so you can ownerdraw nearly all of the elements in it. Our implementation, although does not add anything to it's functionality, adds some nice visual properties to the original control which can be used to create a consistent look with other Klik! EntryLib.Net controls. It supports Office 2007, Office 2003 and other built-in custom styles out of the box and you can adjust those new properties to create your own unique look where you can change the header and selection styles of the control. It's also fully compatible with the old DataGridView, so you can simply replace you old controls with it easily. The above screenshot shows you the look of Office 2007 ModernBlue style, not bad ha?

This was all for this time and see you soon in the next part...

Since we progressed a lot in the new version of Klik! EntryLib.Net, it's time to share those new features with you.

General Improvements

I'm sure most of you want to hear about the changes in drawing/loading of form speed changes as a first thing. I'm glad to inform you that we have completely re-engineered all the drawing routines as well as all other things which might affect form load speed and there is a significant improvement on those areas. Even with the largest amount of controls on a screen, both the load and draw speed is very close to native .Net controls, so you won't bother about this again .

The second thing is that now we have native Office 2007 styles built into our controls. We provide styles available for 3 Office 2007 color schemes and each of them is also provided in modern and classic styles. Modern styles are rendered considering the new drawing style which you can see in Ribbon, etc. where the classic style mimics the look in Outlook 2007.

A new Control, ELProgress

ELProgress is a new addition to our library. There are situations in our applications where we need to notify the user about a long process and this control is an elegant way to do this. As you might noticed, it's not named ProgressBar but only Progress, because it offers you 2 types of view as Bar and Circle. The bar type is like the regular ProgressBar control in .Net but you have total control on the look and can style it in Office 2007 or any other custom look you want. Circle type is the type which is popular on ASP.Net AJAX interfaces nowadays and using it's properties can mimic different type of progress circles you see in Internet Explorer, FireFox, etc.  You'll also have total control over the progress using Maximum, Minimum, Value, etc. properties.

One nice thing is also the Animation feature. Some processes you'll do won't have any specific start and end so you'll need to show some kind of progress animation. When this property is set true, it does exactly this and shows a nice endless animation till you turn it off .

That's all for now for the first part, see you at the next one soon...