RichText Editor in Silverlight and more from DevExpress (Channel 9)

RichText Editor in Silverlight and more from DevExpress

Posted: Apr 09, 2009 at 7:00 AM

By: Adam Kinney

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8 minutes, 32 seconds

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Another opportunity I had at MIX09 was to talk to the guys from DevExpress about the controls they are working on. Azret Botash explains how they are going after the features that people say can't be done and doing them. In this video he demos their Silverlight-based Rich text Editor along with their WPF-based Datagrid.

Rich text layout is something you can do in Silverlight, but because of the absence of the FormattedText class you have to do a lot of extra, quite hacky, work. You can only 'measure' text by creating a TextBlock object and then testing it's ActualWidth property. So you have to add your text to it one word at a time and see when the line gets too long for the space you have in your layout, take the last word back out, position it in your container and repeat. And you have to sort-of guess the line spacing and baseline heights because there's no font metrics class.

I'm pretty staggered that FormattedText is still not in Silverlight 3 beta. Somebody needs to get Bill Hill on the Silverlight team's case because right now Silverlight is just for stupid animations - I can't take any UI technology seriously when it doesn't take text formatting seriously. Right now Silverlight is barely more powerful than AJAX as far as text rendering is concerned.

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Odi Incredible WPF and Silverlight datagrids

Apr 09, 2009 at 7:57 AM quote reply

The rich text editor for Silverlight looks interesting!

EDIT: Just noticed that's my colleague Charles discussing with @IanET right behind Azret
DCMonkey What?!?

Apr 09, 2009 at 9:49 AM quote reply

That text editor is neat. Too bad Silverlight doesn't support printing or right click menus.
stevo_ Human after all

Apr 09, 2009 at 12:25 PM quote reply

Actually you can handle the right click to do context menus, just with a bit of trickery.
DCMonkey What?!?

Apr 09, 2009 at 3:59 PM quote reply

But you shouldn't have to. Cut/Copy/Paste on a textbox context menu has been a standard feature in Windows for almost 15 years. If MS expects Silverlight LOB apps to compete with desktop apps or even plain HTML forms they need to include stuff like this by default.
Scarabus

Apr 09, 2009 at 4:41 PM quote reply

Wow. That guy has great taste in music. Nightwish sure, but Kamelot took me by surprise!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tjh0HEe22ys
Metal at its best.

Oh and the controls were neat too
stevo_ Human after all

Apr 09, 2009 at 4:57 PM quote reply

Yea def, that and supporting dragging and dropping onto (and out of?) silverlight.. when asked they said it was a security issue.. more like an excuse.
rhm

Apr 11, 2009 at 2:01 PM quote reply

Rich text layout is something you can do in Silverlight, but because of the absence of the FormattedText class you have to do a lot of extra, quite hacky, work. You can only 'measure' text by creating a TextBlock object and then testing it's ActualWidth property. So you have to add your text to it one word at a time and see when the line gets too long for the space you have in your layout, take the last word back out, position it in your container and repeat. And you have to sort-of guess the line spacing and baseline heights because there's no font metrics class.

I'm pretty staggered that FormattedText is still not in Silverlight 3 beta. Somebody needs to get Bill Hill on the Silverlight team's case because right now Silverlight is just for stupid animations - I can't take any UI technology seriously when it doesn't take text formatting seriously. Right now Silverlight is barely more powerful than AJAX as far as text rendering is concerned.
darkliahos Something expiramental I did!

Apr 12, 2009 at 2:34 PM quote reply

This looks interesting, I am just getting to grips with Silverlight!
Breezest Flower

Apr 14, 2009 at 12:52 AM quote reply

It would be great if I can use it to edit post in the blog.

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