Combit officially announced the new partnership between TX Text Control and Combit, vendor of the leading reporting tool, List & Label. They recently announced version 16.0 of List & Label which includes a TX Text Control .NET integration.

It will be possible to add TX Text Control objects to your report as a great supplement to the existing RTF object.

More about List & Label 16.0 can be found on their website:

TX Text Control has built-in dialog boxes and error strings. The language used for the built-in TX Text Control resources depends upon the current system language. For example, if a developer builds a satellite assembly for Chinese, the Chinese resources are only loaded, if the current system or thread UI language is also Chinese.

We have just released simplified Chinese dialog box resources for TX Text Control .NET 15.1. You can download these and other resources on this dedicated website section:

TX Text Control Resources

This article describes how to build your own satellite assemblies:

Resource Kit

Today, I talked to our DocumentServer developer team, which is responsible for the MailMerge component, part of TX Text Control .NET Server. They are currently working on new features for version 16.0. Today, I would like to announce two improvements:

• Master-Detail: Nested Merge Blocks
• Image Merge Fields

A master-detail relationship is a 1:n (one-to-many) type relationship. A typical example for such a relationship is a purchase order and a set of items that belongs to each purchase order. This new feature allows you to create complex nested reports in a very easy way. The following screenshot shows such a nested block:

Image merge fields is another oft-requested feature. These image merge fields are normal merge fields with a special indicator. Such fields can be replaced with images during the merge process. This enables you to create templates with placeholders for company logos or signature images.

As soon as I get a pre-build version, I will publish a sample application with these great new features on TX Text Control Labs.

I just wanted to give you a quick update on the upcoming conferences at which we will be exhibiting and speaking.

The first conference starts in 4 weeks: BASTA! in Mainz, Germany. It is the largest and most important .NET conference in Germany with great speakers and leading industry exhibitors.

The second show is the prio.conference 2010 in Nuremberg, Germany. The focus of this year's conference is distributed architecture. They have some great speakers, such as Ralf Westphal and Bernd Marquardt.

In November, the TX Text Control team is back in Las Vegas, USA. The largest Microsoft focused conference DevConnections is back at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino. I already look forward to the keynotes from Scott Guthrie and Dave Mendlen.

BASTA!
20-24 September 2010
http://www.basta.net
Mainz, Germany

prio.conference
19-20 October 2010
http://www.prioconference.de
Nuremberg, Germany

DevConnections
1-4 November 2010
http://www.devconnections.com
Las Vegas, USA

I really look forward to meeting you in person and to show you our lastest versions and new features.

I was able to persuade our WPF team to release a preview sample built with TX Text Control .NET for WPF. We published this WPF project as a ClickOnce application on labs.textcontrol.com.

About two weeks ago, Microsoft released the Ribbon for WPF. This demo word processor shows how TX Text Control .NET for WPF can be used in combination with the Ribbon for WPF. The sample includes the basic functionality of TX Text Control similar to the currently shipped demo TX Text Control Words.

We are investing a lot of time in making TX Text Control compatible with the standard WPF tools and components including this new ribbon bar.

Additionally, this sample shows our new animated color picker implementation that will be shipped with the final release.

Some more impressions of this sample implementation:

Feel free to test this technology preview on your own. You don't have to install anything - it is published as a ClickOnce application. Visit labs.textcontrol.com and start the sample from there: