Attendees at Tech Ed Orlando this week were the first to get a sneak peek at ComponentOne’s new control suites for the Windows 8 Metro platform. Chris and I showed off the two studios at the Visual Studio 2012 Theater. And now we’re extending this sneak peek to our community.

The Controls You Know, Now in Metro

Our strategy is to port the same popular Silverlight and Wijmo controls to the Metro platform. Current ComponentOne users will benefit from familiar object models and feature sets, and new users will notice that these are powerful controls with years of usage poured into them. Our Studio for Silverlight controls (which also share the same codebase as our WPF and Windows Phone controls) will be the basis for our Metro XAML controls that can be coded with C-sharp and VB (and possibly C++ in the future). Our Metro JS controls can be coded in JavaScript for those who are coming from a web background. While the two versions will not be code compatible, many of the same controls and features will exist between both platforms. As with all of ComponentOne’s popular control suites, the idea is to add advanced functionality to existing controls and fill the gap with missing controls. For instance Microsoft did not put any date and time pickers or calendars into the XAML control toolbox. So we’ve developed a set of 6 unique and extremely useful input controls for DateTime selection, such as C1Calendar, C1DatePicker, C1TimeSelector and C1DateSelector. The other area we are targeting for the first public release is data visualization. Our existing XAML and JavaScript based chart and gauge libraries are some of the first to be included in the new suites. C1Chart for XAML has been slightly modified for multi-touch interaction. Users can tap, pinch and slide the plot area to perform various translate and scaling actions. And like its Silverlight/WPF counterpart, it comes with endless functionality such as labels, markers, multiple plot areas, multiple axes and over 30 different chart types. With ComponentOne Gauges for Metro XAML you will get several different gauge controls for displaying bound numeric values. These gauges include C1Knob and C1RegionKnob which support user interaction like an oven timer. And finally, the first public release of Studio for Metro XAML will include the immersive C1TileView control. Perfect for dashboards this ItemsControl takes advantage of the touch and animation experience of the Metro platform.

Be the First to Get these Controls

Sign up below to join our mailing list. We plan to roll out the CTP within the next few weeks! http://www.componentone.com/metro