Preperations are moving at a fast pace and we are looking forward to presenting our latest developments and future plans at the largest and long awaited .NET conference:

The Visual Studio 2010 launch in Las Vegas, USA.

Developers, top speakers, such as Scott Guthrie and leading component vendors will gather at the world famous Bellagio for the Microsoft Visual Studio Conference & Expo.

If you plan to visit this conference, do not forget to stop by at our booth. I really look forward to meeting you in person.

Hawaii is coming! Microsoft is working on the latest Visual Studio version (Codename: Hawaii) which will be released in April. It will be officially presented at the DevConnections conference on April 12–14 in Las Vegas, USA.

If you plan to visit this event, we would be glad to welcome you at our booth where we will present our latest developments.

Since 2008, where Microsoft released the first CTP version (community technology preview), we have been testing and integrating the new Visual Studio version. We have made a commitment to support Visual Studio 2010. TX Text Control .NET, TX Text Control RapidSpell .NET and TX Text Control .NET Server will be tested and designed in order to support the new or improved features of this IDE.

Supported features by TX Text Control (Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2):

• Toolbox support
• Property browsing
• WYSIWYG preview
• Drag & drop in the designer
• SmartTag support (common tasks wizard)
• IntelliSense support (including member description)

We are looking forward to this great new IDE and the possibilities of the .NET Framework 4.0.

Inspired by a customer's project, I built a small sample that shows how to insert and process MS Word compatible checkbox form fields using TX Text Control .NET.

Read the full article and download the Visual Studio 2008 project in our source code library:

Inserting and processing MS Word compatible FORMCHECKBOX fields

TX Text Control .NET provides fully compatible fields to insert and update these date fields. The fields can be accessed through the interface for MS Word fields using the ApplicationField class.

Anyway, the included DocumentServer provides the FieldAdapter class. It implements an adapter for the most commonly used fields like the DATE or MERGEFIELD. In an older post, I explained how to use this adapter class.

Today, I would like to show you how an MS Word compatible DATE field can be created, inserted and updated.

In order to use the AdapterFields, you need to add a reference to the TXDocumentServer.dll. In your Visual Studio 2008 project, click on Project and Add Reference..., select TXTextControl DocumentServer in the .NET tab and confirm with OK.

To add the field, you simply need to create a new DateField using the AdapterField classes:

// [C#]
TXTextControl.DocumentServer.Fields.DateField date = 
	new TXTextControl.DocumentServer.Fields.DateField();
date.Date = DateTime.Now;

textControl1.ApplicationFields.Add(date.ApplicationField);

TX Text Control .NET doesn't update the field automatically, but provides the interface to update it. Therefore, we can set the Date property of the field to the current date. Finally, the adapter field will be added to the ApplicationField collection of TextControl.

Now, you have to decide when to update the date in the document. For example, you could update the DATE fields when the document is loaded, saved or printed. The following code updates all DATE fields in a document with the current date:

// [C#]
foreach (TXTextControl.ApplicationField field in textControl1.ApplicationFields)
{
	if (field.TypeName == "DATE")
	{
		TXTextControl.DocumentServer.Fields.DateField curDate =
			new TXTextControl.DocumentServer.Fields.DateField(field);
		curDate.Date = DateTime.Now;
	}
}

An interesting member of the DATE field is the Format property. It gets and sets the format of the field using the standard DateTime format string of the .NET Framework. The following format would display only the full name of the day:

// [C#]
date.Format = "dddd";

As you can see, using TX Text Control .NET, you get an easy way to include MS Word-compatible fields. If you export the document to an MS Word format like DOCX, DOC or RTF, these fields and their functionality are maintained and available in MS Word.

You can download the sample project for Visual Studio 2008 here (a TX Text Control .NET 15.1 trial version is required):

tx_sample_msworddate.zip

The requests from you are growing and I thought to share our plans for a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) version of TX Text Control.

We have done a lot of research on WPF and related technlogies like Visual Studio 2010 since the first CTP or beta versions were released many years ago. At this point our developers have been working on a WPF version for months. We believe in the motto say what you do and do what you say, I would like to announce the upcoming WPF version. I am not able to reveal a release date, but summer 2010 is quite possible.

Our current Windows Forms version can be already integrated into a WPF page using the WindowsFormsHost class. Our goal is to keep the WPF version as compatible as possible. It should be possible to replace the Windows Forms version with the WPF version without changing the code.

As soon as possible, I will publish more information regarding the projected release. Feel free to post any comments or questions you might have.

Interesting speakers, industry leading component vendors and highly professional visitors are expected on one of the largest .NET conferences in Europe.

We will be there with our own booth to show you our latest developments and future plans. If you plan to visit this conference, make sure you stop by our booth. I would be glad to meet you in person.

More information about the conference and all sessions can be found on the official conference website:

http://www.basta.net

Homepage

By clicking on the arrows to the right and left of the main graphic, you can now quickly jump between TX Text Control products. Similarly, you can now access the latest blog posts using the spring board to the right.

Search Box - with auto complete

When you enter a search term into the search box at the top right of every page, an auto complete list appears from which, you can select commonly used search terms. For example, all the properties and methods that TX Text Control offers are available in the auto complete list. This makes searching in the documentation much easier.

Source Code Library - new structure

Over the past two decades, we have collected a large number of source code snippets. They are updated for each new version of TX Text Control. To allow faster access to these samples, we have now re-structured the entire library. It is now sorted by TX Text Control product and programming environment.

Page Loading - much faster

A number of techniques have been deployed under the hood to make the TX Text Control web site load as quickly as possible. If you used the old web site a lot, you should be able to feel the increase in page loading speed.

Comments Welcome

If you have any comments about the new web site or if you notice that something is not working as you think it should, please post a comment below. Thank you. :-)

The Columbia Enterprise Developers Guild is hosting the first Columbia Code Camp this month. We are proud to help the organizers by sponsoring them.

The code camp takes place on the campus of the University of South Carolina on Saturday, January 30th starting at 8:00 AM.

More information about the code camp can be found on the dedicated website:

http://www.columbiacodecamp.com

• Service Pack 1 for TX Text Control .NET Server 15.1
• Service Pack 1 for TX Text Control .NET 15.1

• Service Pack 1 for TX Text Control ActiveX Server 15.1
• Service Pack 1 for TX Text Control ActiveX 15.1

Once you have taken a look at the fixed known issues, please download the service pack.

The support department is waiting assist you in all matters related to TX Text Control.

Version 15.1 implements an ID and a Name property for these frame-based objects. These properties helps you to find an image or frame based on a specific name. In previous versions, there was no way to get a specific text frame out of the document, though it was possible to iterate through all frames using it's collection. But now, you can use the GetItem method to retrieve a specific text frame.

Consider the following scenario: A text frame is inserted into a template that contains the recipient's address on a letter. During the merge process, you simply need to find that text frame based on it's Name in order to update the text.

The Name property is also compatible to other supported formats like DOCX, DOC or RTF and will be maintained after saving to these formats.

The following code inserts a text frame with the name recipient. It shows that the Name property is maintained after saving as DOCX. Using the GetItem method, the text frame can be retrieved in order to update it's text.

// [C#]
TextFrame frame = new TextFrame(new Size(2000, 2000));
frame.Name = "recipient";

textControl1.TextFrames.Add(frame, -1);

// save as DOCX and reload to prove that the Name is maintained
byte[] data;
textControl1.Save(out data, BinaryStreamType.WordprocessingML);
textControl1.ResetContents();
textControl1.Load(data, BinaryStreamType.WordprocessingML);

textControl1.TextFrames.GetItem("recipient").Selection.Text = "TX Text Control";