Sneak Peek

This article, part of a series, describes upcoming features that will be part of the next version of TX Text Control. A release date is not known yet and will be announced separately.

Since version 30.0, TX Text Control supports .NET 5 and .NET 6 Windows Forms, WPF and ASP.NET applications. For Windows Forms and WPF, Microsoft decided to change the Visual Studio design-time experience and other features such as third-party licensing.

The next version 31.0 is in the works and for .NET Windows Forms and WPF, we are working on enhancements to fully support .NET 5 and 6 features including:

• NuGet packages
• Visual Studio design-time support (Windows Forms)
• .NET 5 and 6 compatible licensing
• Easy deployment

NuGet Packages

For our ASP.NET products, we are providing NuGet packages since years. Finally, NuGet arrived in Windows Forms and WPF (at least for .NET Core). All compiled dependencies are bundled into a package that contain all DLLs together with other content needed in the projects that consume these components.

After TX Text Control has been installed using the developer kit setup, the new NuGet package source "Text Control Offline Packages" is added to NuGet and contains all available NuGet packages for TX Text Control:

After adding the NuGet package to the project, all available toolbox entries are added automatically:

The advantage of this mechanism is that only the toolbox items are available that are required for the current project.

Design-Time Support

After creating a TextControl on a form, you have full access to the designer functionality to add more components such as the ribbon bar, ruler bars and to connect and arrange controls automatically.

Licensing

With version 30.0, it was required to enable the obsolete .NET BinaryFormatter while compiling the license into the assembly. We removed this requirement in version 31.0, so that no additional settings are required to use TX Text Control in .NET Core applications. This change is valid for all versions including Windows Forms, WPF and ASP.NET.

Easy Deployment

When deploying the application, TX Text Control 31.0 fully supports the Publish functionality of Visual Studio. For example, in the following screenshot the application is published to a folder.

After selecting the folder, you can choose the Target runtime and the Deployment mode:

When the application is published, all required files (including the binary filters of TX Text Control) are copied into the right location automatically:

We are very happy that these mechanisms finally arrived in the desktop development world and we are fully committed to support Microsoft's .NET strategy.

Stay tuned for more features!