Microsoft’s big theme this year was transformation, and they lived up to it. We’ve seen Xamarin Studio integrated into Visual Studio; Azure’s continued expansion; a new Visual Studio, not to mention a new Visual Studio for Mac. Windows 10 closed out its one-year free adoption offer, and UWP continues to grow its market. We’re saying goodbye to LightSwitch, and hello to PowerApps. They introduced the HoloLens. Being Visual Studio Industry Partners and a Microsoft Gold Partner, we pay attention to everything Microsoft does, and our offerings continued to evolve this year. We offered Xuni’s Xamarin controls as part of ComponentOne Studio’s suite of .NET controls, and may do so again in the future. (Jump to Xuni’s roadmap.) We’re fully compatible with Visual Studio 2017 RC (of course) and you can listen to our thoughts on Visual Studio Mac:

In non-Microsoft news, Angular 2 was officially released this year, and Wijmo’s suite of JavaScript controls has full support for Angular 2, not to mention React and Vue. Wijmo continues to grow and expand, and our ASP.NET MVC controls follow soon behind—you’ll find close parity in JavaScript and MVC controls.

In 2017, we expect to see more transformational developments from Microsoft: more cloud, more native mobile, more open source. We plan to stay ahead of the game, as always. Without further adieu, here’s GrapeCity’s roadmap for 2017.

ComponentOne Studio

Our strategy in recent years has been to focus on developing around our “Flex philosophy”: flexible, lightweight, fast, universal controls that are don’t add bloat and are the same across multiple platforms. We continue to develop FlexChart, FlexReport, and FlexGrid into the best, most flexible, fastest, lightweight charts, reports, and grids in the industry.

Windows Desktop: WinForms, UWP, and WPF

WinForms continues to one of our best-selling individual editions, indicating that even as Microsoft moves on to the cloud and mobile, you’re still leveraging the power of desktop. 2017 will see enhancements to FlexGrid and TrueDBGrid, our two most popular controls. The big news for our Windows platforms (WinForms, WPF, and UWP) is all about data visualization: we’ll expand our FlexChart offerings with the goal of full parity with Excel’s charts. That includes:

• Box and Whisker charts
• An error bar
• AxisBinding
• Multiple Plot Areas
• FinancialChart feature parity with MVC
• New TreeMap control

WinForms will also see the launch of SparkLine and BulletGraph, along with PDFDocumentSource, which was released in beta in November. TreeView will include enhancements like a context menu, auto-search, and custom nodes. A new Calendar control will combine C1DateEdit and C1Calendar to provide a faster, better Calendar control. Last but not least in WinForms news: Ribbon and themes will be upgrade to Office 2016! In WPF and UWP, we’re also adding some popular Input controls: InputPanel and MultiSelect Drop-Down. In addition, we’ve created a new CollectionView Navigator UI that allows the user to navigate, add, edit and delete records. It can be used with data-aware controls like InputPanel. In WinForms, WPF, and UWP, we'll soon be releasing the C1Bitmap control, which supports light image editing and export. Watch the video for more info:

RichTextBox continues to grow: we’re adding tracking changes and section columns; GanttView will include Microsoft Product XML import. Lastly, FlexGrid will be undergoing a full performance evaluation, and we’re adding an Expression Editor that integrates CalcEngine, so you’ll have a generic editor that allows your users to evaluate expressions at runtime. In WPF, we’ll be launching FlexReport, FlexViewer and GanttView (beta in November 2016).

Web Controls: ASP.NET MVC and Wijmo JavaScript

MVC continues following in the successful footsteps of Wijmo, adding a MultiRow control (for wrapping columns in a side-scrolling grid); radar, polar, and funnel charts; and PDFViewer. You’ll also get Wijmo FlexGrid’s footer panel, built-in validations, and FlexViewer mobile support. OLAP and DataEngine Web API will also launch in 2017 for MVC, and we’ll be adding an Excel library for .NET Core. Lastly, ASP.NET MVC will support .NET Core 2.0. Read more about Wijmo’s 2017 roadmap.

Native Mobile: Xuni Xamarin

With Microsoft’s integration of Xamarin Studio into Visual Studio 2017 RC, Xamarin controls will be Xuni’s focus in the new year. We’re rearchitecting the controls to ensure the best performance and feature availability we can offer. We’ll be adding UWP support, as well, which means if you’re focusing solely on native mobile, you can also support Windows 10 devices across the board. (Of course, you can also create native UWP apps using C1Studio.) FlexGrid will see a host of new features, none of which are available in Xamarin’s out-of-the-box grid control:

• Pull to Refresh on Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android
• Built-in support for incremental loading
• Multi-level grouping
• Broader layout options
• More Excel-like selection,
• New brushes for styling the Grid

Lastly, FlexViewer will be coming to native mobile, completing our cross-platform story for FlexReport. Generate a code-free report in FlexReport Designer on your desktop, and view that report in web or native-mobile apps. Read more about Xuni's roadmap for 2017.