Xceed has long been honored to be able to claim some of the biggest names in computer technology as their customers. Among the tens of thousands of users of Xceed’s products, Microsoft and IBM have trusted our products for nearly ten years. Our flagship WPF datagrid is no exception. Indeed, Xceed DataGrid for WPF Professional Edition has been used by these companies in recent and upcoming versions of some of their software.

Microsoft, on the one hand, selected our WPF grid control to implement part of its Visual Studio Team System 2010 product, which is an integrated Application Life-cycle Management (ALM) solution comprising tools, processes, and guidance. Xceed DataGrid for WPF handles test pass display duties in this upcoming product.

“Using Xceed DataGrid for WPF Professional Edition in Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2010 helped us greatly reduce the time and resources necessary for developing all the data presentation features we needed. Working with Xceed has been a pleasure, and they update the product often and provide innovative new features such as 3D views for visualizing data. We will certainly continue to look at their technology in the future as a complement to our products,” said Norman Guadagno, director of product marketing for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System.

IBM, on the other hand, used our WPF datagrid for parts of the UI of SystemBuilder 4GL (SB+), a rapid application development solution. “IBM U2 researched existing third-party solutions and identified Xceed DataGrid for WPF as the most suitable tool. The datagrid’s performance and solid foundation take true advantage of WPF and provide the extensibility required for IBM U2 customers to take their applications to the next level in presentation design and styling,” said Vinnie Smith, U2 Tools product manager.

Xceed DataGrid for WPF Professional Edition is not just the most rock-solid, time-tested grid control for Windows Presentation Foundation on the market. It also boasts more features than any other offering and a flexible, extensible object model. Add that it provides unbeatable performance, handling millions of rows and thousands of columns, and it becomes easy to understand why it’s the most-adopted WPF datagrid available: the users of Xceed DataGrid for WPF—which number in the tens of thousands—know they have the best and regularly say so on one of the most active WPF forums around.

Featuring rich in-place editing that delivers 12 flexible, themed, and themable editor controls that are also usable outside the grid (including a datepicker and a masked textbox), Xceed DataGrid for WPF Professional Edition has powerful hierarchical master-detail and grouping. It also provides an interactive Cardflow™ 3D view with multiple card layouts, as well as traditional 2D table and card views. End-users can switch between any 2D and 3D view on the fly while retaining the datagrid’s state.

Developed entirely for WPF and built for .NET 3.5, Xceed DataGrid for WPF Professional Edition features high-quality, pixel-perfect themes such as Glass, Office 2007, and Windows Media Player 11, as well as Classic, Luna, Aero, Royale, and Zune. The datagrid’s rich printing support allows for easy report creation, while its statistical rows and functions can be used both inside and outside of a grid in any element. Column stretching and column widths supporting star values are also supported. Automatic Excel-like filtering lets end-users better manage the data they see, as do the fixed-column and the custom sorting functionalities. Finally, UI virtualization reduces load time and memory usage.

Xceed Real-Time Zip for Silverlight lets developers add indispensible zip and unzip archive capabilities to any Silverlight 2 application, quickly and easily. And because it compresses and uncompresses files without resorting to intermediate disk/memory storage or temporary files, it’s the perfect match for Silverlight: it needs no local write access!

The first and only professional solution for bringing zip and unzip capabilities to the rich Internet applications that Silverlight makes possible, Xceed Real-Time Zip for Silverlight delivers the utmost flexibility for your compression/decompression needs. Developers using this library will be able to create Silverlight apps capable of performing various zip/unzip operations. For example, Silverlight apps can now unzip user-provided or remotely hosted Zip files, whose data the Silverlight application could then consume or send elsewhere over the network, using FTP, HTTP, WCF, etc. Or they can zip user-selected files or data created by the Silverlight application based on user input, and then send it over the network.

Easy to use and needing just a few methods to perform powerful streaming Zip compression/extraction, Xceed Real-Time Zip for Silverlight supports the BZip2, BWT, Deflate, and Deflate64™ compression methods. AES encryption and decryption are supported for maximum security and WinZip compatibility. Events and properties let the application monitor and control the zip/unzip operations. The component also works perfectly with Xceed Upload for Silverlight.

Written in 100% managed C# code to offer developers creating Silverlight 2 software for websites the highest performance and flexibility possible, this lightweight library comes with full support for VB.NET and C# and includes sample applications. To increase development momentum, the classes integrate seamlessly with the base class library, and the component offers comprehensive Visual Studio-style documentation.

The product supports Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2, Windows 2000, and Windows Server 2003 (except IA-64), and runs in Internet Explorer 7 and 6, Firefox 2 and 1.5, and Safari (Mac OS 10.4.8+ only). Note: Some OS/browser combinations are not supported by Silverlight. Xceed Real-Time Zip for Silverlight can be purchased separately, or as part of Xceed Ultimate Suite or Xceed Data Manipulation Suite. A fully functional free trial version of this 100%-managed component designed to work with Silverlight 2 is now available for download.

On track for a January 2009 release, Xceed DataGrid for WPF 3.1 promises to deliver the features you want and need to keep your applications at the head of the pack, into the new year and beyond. This update will be the twentieth in its short but exciting history!

• Data virtualization (also known as “virtual mode”, “lazy loading”, “paging”, etc.)
• UI automation (including support for automated UI testing tools such as QTP)
• Export to Excel
• Persisting and restoring user settings
• Field chooser (also known as column chooser)
• Copy/paste
• Built-in delete
• Improved support for alternating rows
• Other minor improvements

For a list of some of the features we’re considering adding further down the road, take a look at this post by vice president Odi Kosmatos on the subject.

In his second Channel 9 video interview, Pascal Bourque, the lead developer of Xceed DataGrid for WPF, demonstrates a prototype featuring smooth scrolling, pinned headers, flick gestures with viscosity, and improvements to perceived performance.

Marc Laroche is a senior developer at Xceed whose work on Xceed DataGrid for WPF helped make it a resounding success. He is now the lead developer of our upcoming Silverlight datagrid. He was recently asked by Channel 9 to demonstrate the 3D capabilities of our WPF datagrid and Xceed 3D Views for WPF, as well as other new features of version 3.0 of our WPF datagrid.

At Xceed, we firmly believe that WPF and Silverlight are the way of the future. That doesn’t mean however that we have abandoned our line of .NET products!

Our flagship, award-winning .NET control, Xceed Grid for .NET, has been updated to version 3.8. This minor update features the addition of auto-complete capabilities to the editors available in Xceed Editors for .NET, included with the Windows Forms datagrid, as well as several small bug fixes. Finally, the grid’s editors have been modified recently to address an issue with pop-ups when working with VB6.

The multi-talented Xceed Grid for .NET lets you do so much more with a single component! Why learn the object models of several components, which usually don’t live up to expectations? Why bother with the added expense of buying several components? With Xceed’s reliable grid control, all your data grid needs are taken care of, combining the power of hierarchical master/detail views and Outlook-style row grouping with all of the best capabilities of bound and unbound grids, with the performance enhancements of cell UI virtualization for shorter load times and decreased memory use. And all of these capabilities are presented through a rich, logical and highly extensible object-oriented programming model.

With its built-in report generator and the controls from Xceed Editors for .NET used as its default editors (also usable outside the grid), Xceed Grid for .NET lets developers address multiple areas and build the most solid and feature-packed applications around.

Xceed’s first experience as an exhibitor at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC 2008) has left us with great memories and new friends. Odi, Charles, and Jenny, who ran our booth in the exhibition hall, as well as developers Pascal and Marc who were in attendance at the conference and the entire Xceed team back home, would like to thank everyone who dropped by.

PDC 2008 gave us an opportunity to meet so many of our customers and to demonstrate our latest prototype WPF datagrid with smooth scrolling and data virtualization, which met with rave reviews! Kudos to Catherine for designing our beautiful booth and to Matt for the videos we had on display!

We are currently working on updates to our FileSystem-based products to bring important reliability improvements when using their FTP capabilities.

Our FileSystem-based product line includes the very popular Xceed Zip for .NET and Xceed FTP for .NET, as well as several other more recent additions. Constantly evolving, these products have remained at the forefront of the data manipulation market since their release. The products are available for individual purchase or as part of Xceed Data Manipulation Suite, which contains 16 meticulously designed and tested components. This package provides over $5500 worth of the highest-quality libraries for only $649.95!

Xceed Data Manipulation Suite provides all of Xceed's .NET / .NET CF / Silverlight 2 controls written in managed code, all ActiveX / COM controls written in ATL 3.0 and supporting both STA and MTA multi-threaded apartment models. It lets developers easily implement zip file manipulation, secure FTP transfers, stream and data compression, simultaneously multi-location file and folder synchronization, Tar, GZip, 256-bit AES strong encryption, RSA public key cryptography, hashing, self-extracting, binary to text encoding, scheduled backups, and more.

Xceed's VP of R&D, Odi Kosmatos, and our head technical writer, Jenny Béland, have both started up blogs on xceed.com.

Have you been bitten by the Microsoft technology bug? For the past 15 years, Microsoft's innovations have served to inspire the creation of some of the world's most popular third-party components here at Xceed—most recently for Silverlight and WPF—and Odi has been a driving force behind all of them. Odi's blog is the place to go for his views and news on the component-oriented industry.

Jenny's blog, Don't Panic!, will feature posts from the perspective of a developer moving from Windows Forms to WPF, using Xceed DataGrid for WPF to create an LOB application as an example. Each tutorial post will show how to accomplish tasks using a traditional Windows Forms approach, and then show how to do the same thing using the recommended WPF equivalent. The goal is for the posts to provide a bridge between the two worlds of WinForms and WPF/XAML.