Thanks to the addition of support for the LMZA compression algorithm, all of Xceed’s Zip compression products now let you create applications that can uncompress Zip files created by the most popular compression utilities on the market, WinZip 12. And Xceed’s data manipulation solutions are the only ones that let you do this!

According to its creators, WinZip has a user base of several million users. The technologies in the latest version are bound to attract many users for various reasons. Primarily, users will want to be able to use the LZMA algorithm, which can compress files with compression ratios that are considerably higher than what other algorithms such as bzip2 are capable of, yet with decompression speeds comparable to what gzip can accomplish. Furthermore, LZMA is used by default by WinZip 12 when it deems that method appropriate for the file being compressed. The result is that there are many, many Zip files created with the latest version of WinZip. Being able to add the ability to handle all those files to your software can therefore go far in determining its success.

What's more, the latest versions of Xceed’s Zip compression products also support UTF-8 character encoding to provide enhanced support of international characters in filenames and comments, further improving WinZip 12 support.

In addition to being the most advanced Zip solutions available, Xceed’s Zip solutions are backed by a proven 15-year track record, which means you can trust it to build reliable, robust applications.

The following products are affected by these improvements: Xceed Zip for .NET / .NET CF, Xceed Zip for .NET with Self-Extractor, Xceed Real-Time Zip for .NET / .NET CF, Xceed Real-Time Zip for Silverlight, Xceed Zip Compression Library, Xceed Zip for x64, and Xceed Activities for Workflow Foundation.

On track for an August or September 2009 release, Xceed’s WPF theme products will allow developers to apply flawless Windows themes to all of the WPF controls in their applications with a single line of XAML code. All of the official WPF controls are 100% supported, as well as their “child” controls.

Furthermore, because the necessary brushes and resources will be provided, you can easily apply the themes to their own controls. The themes can also be customized simply by setting standard properties on the WPF controls. For example, by setting a control’s foreground or background color, one of our themes can be used but with your own color scheme.

Finally, the XAML code used in the product is clean and tidy, unlike the output of Expression Blend. The source code will be available in a Blueprint Edition.

The themes will be available individually or bundled. The bundled product will be called Xceed Professional Themes for WPF. The single-theme products are as follows:

• Xceed Office 2007 Themes for WPF (includes blue, black, and silver versions)
• Xceed Glass Theme for WPF
• Xceed Media Theme for WPF