ComponentOne Roadmap 2022

A new year means a new version of .NET to look forward to. Here's a look at what's to come in 2022 from GrapeCity's ComponentOne control suite.

WinForms Roadmap

You'll see many more features and enhancements for .NET 6 and Visual Studio 2022 as we complete porting UI controls and bring the design-time experience up to speed with what you have come to love with our .NET Framework controls.

.NET Version Support Plan

In 2022 we will release a new .NET Framework 4.8 version of all ComponentOne WinForms controls. The main benefit to updating will be intrinsic performance improvements and high resolution/DPI support. We will continue to support the .NET Framework 4.5.2 version for the foreseeable future, but you can expect that eventually, new features and controls will only be released in .NET 4.8 and higher.

As announced in the community forums a few years ago, we have ended support for .NET Framework 2.0 controls. You can still obtain these controls from our support channels, but we recommend upgrading to higher versions.

Our .NET Framework 4.0 controls are in maintenance mode, which only addresses major issues. We will not support design-time support for 4.0 controls in Visual Studio 2022. We recommend upgrading your application's controls for active development and only using 4.0 if you maintain old applications.

.NET 5 support will end 12/31/2022, as this is intended as an intermediate version and upgrade/transition to .NET 6. And we will have .NET 7 support by the end of the year.

FlexGrid for WinForms Enhancements

We plan to add several time-saving features to FlexGrid for WinForms, including column pickers, multi-range selection, scrollbar annotations, and hover styles. We also plan to improve the .NET 6 & Visual Studio 2022 design-time with an enhanced column band designer. And you'll finally be able to save the column layout without the data for more application persistence scenarios.

New WinForms Controls

Our goal is to complete the .NET 6 migration for remaining controls, including Editor, Gauges, GanntView, List, FinancialChart, Chart3D, and SpellChecker. We will also introduce a new Accordion control to fill the gap left by legacy UI controls such as C1OutBar, C1NavBar, and C1TopicBar. The Accordion control will offer the same UI functionality but with a more modern appearance.

For document libraries, GrapeCity released Documents a few years back. While we are dedicated to including and supporting the latest document export features within our UI controls like FlexGrid and FlexReport, we understand some developers used our long-running .NET PDF and Excel libraries on their own. For 2022, we decided to migrate the C1Pdf and C1Excel libraries to .NET 6. We appreciate the feedback gathered over the past year, which helped us make this decision.

New Features and Quality of Life Improvements

In addition to FlexGrid, we have a long list of more minor improvements planned for other controls, including FlexChart, TreeView, FinancialChart, FlexReport, and FlexPivot. For example, we are working to improve data binding features in TreeView for different nesting scenarios, expanding our data source integration in the FlexReport designer and runtime conditional formatting for FlexPivot.

WPF Roadmap

Our focus in WPF is to continue improving the design-time experience in Visual Studio 2022 as we complete our .NET 6 migration and introduce .NET 7 support. And we will add smaller .NET Framework enhancements throughout.

.NET Version Support Plan

Like WinForms, we plan to release a new .NET Framework 4.6.2 version of our WPF controls. This is so we can keep our UI controls up to date with the latest features and support since .NET Framework 4.5.2 will end support by Microsoft in 2022.

.NET 5 support will end 12/31/2022, as this is intended as an intermediate version and upgrade/transition to .NET 6. And we will have .NET 7 support by the end of the year.

New WPF Controls and Themes

Our goal is to complete the .NET 6 migration for the remaining controls, including FlexViewer, GanttView, InputPanel, Barcode, Sparkline, and Gauges. Suppose you've already migrated to .NET 6. In that case, you will have noticed our new default fluent-style theme for all WPF controls (no more gradients (by default anyway (you can still create gradients))). in addition to the new default theme, we wanted to add a new 'System' theme so you can get a more traditional gray/Windows look - great for maintaining consistency with standard UI controls.

New Features and Quality of Life Improvements

We have a long list of improvements we want to bring to FlexGrid for WPF in 2022, including banded columns, footers, and scrollbar tooltips. Plus, we have a long-term plan to introduce a transposed FlexGrid extension across all platforms. For now, you can achieve it with just some code - see 4 Steps to Transpose and Invert a WPF Datagrid.

Plus, we will enhance RichTextBox, DockControl, FlexChart, and more in .NET Framework and UI Automation support for .NET 6. For example, we plan to add a runtime toolbar to FlexChart for runtime chart configuration. If we have time, introduce a new RulesManager UI component for runtime conditional formatting for datagrids like FlexGrid and FlexPivot.

Blazor Roadmap

For our toddler platform, Blazor, we are focused on quality improvements for FlexGrid and bringing our document viewer, FlexViewer, to the web platform. We plan to enhance the built-in filtering capabilities of FlexGrid by introducing a new DataFilter UI component that will allow users to apply multiple filters on the entire data set with an intuitive panel.

Other FlexGrid features planned include column picker, footers, state persistence, and pinned columns. Our new FlexViewer for Blazor will bring PDF viewing to your Blazor web apps.

And of course, we will continue .NET 6 and .NET 7 support for Blazor.

WinUI & MAUI Roadmap

Our plan for WinUI is to focus on FlexGrid and additional UI components that complement datagrid features, like input and data filters. In 2022 we plan to finish some key features for FlexGrid in WinUI, such as printing, file export, and built-in filters using a separate DataFilter UI.

For MAUI, we had planned a preview for the end of 2021. However, the platform did not stabilize and Microsoft even delayed its release. At this time, our MAUI component development is on hold.

Data Services Roadmap

Our Data Services library will continue to expand in 2022 with additional data source connectors. While the list is not final, we plan to have connectors for Marketo, Pardot, Hubspot, Square, and ServiceNow.

Let Us Know What You Think

As is often true in software development, plans are intentional until things change, especially if we get valuable feedback from users on what is important to them. Comment below and let us know what you think about our roadmap and what you would like to see.