Syncfusion Essential Studio 2023 Volume 1 Is Here!

Syncfusion is excited to roll out its first major release of the year: Essential Studio 2023 Volume 1. This release is packed with highly demanded, exciting new controls and features on all platforms. All the bug fixes completed before the code freeze are also included.

Before going through the major highlights of the 2023 Volume 1 release, we are pleased to announce that we have updated the versioning system of Essential Studio to the Semantic format. This provides greater clarity and consistency in versioning, making it easier for users to understand the significance of each Syncfusion release.

The new format consists of three components: Major, Minor, and Patch.

Format syntax: Major.Minor.Patch
Example: 21.1.35

We believe this change will enable our users to track and manage updates to our components effectively.

Now, let’s go through a brief description of the major highlights of every platform.

.NET MAUI

• Three new controls are included in the .NET MAUI suite for this release:
  • Masked Entry
  • Popup
  • Shimmer
• The Masked Entry control is an advanced version of the input control that restricts the input of certain characters, text, and numbers by using a mask pattern.
• The .NET MAUI Pop-up control is an alert dialog that displays content in a separate window that shows on top of the current screen.
• The .NET MAUI Shimmer control is a powerful tool for enhancing an application’s responsiveness during background data loading by showing modern shimmer effects.
• The following controls are developed to meet industry standards and are marked as production ready:
  • Funnel Charts
  • Pyramid Charts
  • Maps
  • Backdrop
  • Text Input Layout
  • Calendar
  • Autocomplete
  • ComboBox
  • DataForm
  • Rating
• The .NET MAUI PDF Viewer control now supports:
  • Text search: Search for the desired text and navigate to all its occurrences in a PDF document.
  • Document link navigation: Navigate to a desired topic or position using document link annotations (table of contents).
  • Hyperlink navigation: Open URLs or website links in a PDF document in the default browser.
  • Right to left (RTL): Change the user interface from left-to-right (LTR) to right-to-left (RTL).
  • Localization: All static text within the PDF Viewer can be localized to any supported language.
• The .NET MAUI Cartesian charts now support:
  • Range column charts to visualize data points with range columns, making it easy to identify patterns and trends, as well as to compare different data sets.
  • Bubble charts to compare values of different data points and provide a more comprehensive view of the data.
  • Stacked column charts to display the cumulative value of data points and make it easy to identify patterns and trends in the data.
  • Waterfall charts, displayed as rectangles with connectors between each one, making it easy to understand the impact of each value on the overall total.
  • Box-and-whisker charts that provide a standardized and concise way of displaying the distribution of data and identifying outliers.
  • Error bar charts, used to indicate errors or uncertainties in reported values, allowing for the discovery of potential measurement deviations.
• The .NET MAUI Circular charts now support a radial bar chart to show comparisons between categories using circular shapes.
• The .NET MAUI DataForm now supports floating label layout, which displays a label floating above an input editor such as entry, editor, auto-complete, and combo box.
• The .NET MAUI DataGrid control now supports:
  • Stacked headers, allowing grouping columns under a common header.
  • Summaries to display a row containing summary data for the columns at the top or bottom of a grid.
  • Freeze panes to freeze certain rows or columns so that they remain visible when the rest of the grid is scrolled.

Xamarin

• The Xamarin PDF Viewer now supports:
  • Highlighting text in text annotations and when searching for text in a PDF document.
  • Rendering PDF files using the PDFium rendering engine in the UWP platform.
  • Rendering annotations in the PDF file in their original order.
  • Adding and modifying values of form fields programmatically.
  • Enabling and disabling the editing of form fields.
  • Changing the bounds of signature and ink annotations programmatically.
• The Xamarin Rich Text Editor now supports moving the cursor programmatically to the beginning and end of the content.

Flutter

• The following widgets are developed to meet industry standards and are now marked as production-ready
  • Treemap
  • Excel Library
• The Flutter DataGrid widget now supports:
  • Changing the position of the sort and filter icons.
  • Invoking the methods onCellSubmit, canSubmitCell, and performSorting asynchronously.
  • Changing the text style of the filter pop-up menu.
• The Flutter PDF Viewer widget allows customizing the maximum zoom value of a PDF document.

Blazor

• The Blazor Rating component meets industry standards and is now marked as production-ready.
• The Blazor Dropdown List, ComboBox, and AutoComplete components now support virtual scrolling.
• The Blazor Grid now supports binding and managing date and time-only values, allowing users to perform sorting, filtering, grouping, searching, and CRUD operations.
• The Blazor Diagram now supports scrolling automatically when the node is moved beyond the boundary.
• The Blazor File Upload component is now optimized to handle large files that are 2 GB and above.
• The Blazor Pivot Table component now supports paging content, allowing users to break and display large data page by page.
• The Blazor Gantt Chart component can now highlight a single task or a chain of linked tasks that directly impacts the project’s end date.

Essential JS 2

• All Syncfusion Vue components are now compatible with Nuxt 3 and Vitest frameworks.
• The new Ribbon control is introduced in Essential JS 2 platforms to provide a structured and easy-to-use interface to access features and functions.
• The File Manager component now supports virtual scrolling to improve performance when loading files and folders in detailed and large icon views.
• The Grid component now supports:
  • A new search-and-filter feature to perform precise and targeted searches, like:
    • Does not contain
    • Is null or is not null
    • Is it like or is it not like
    • Does not start with or does not end with.
  • Rendering columns based on the width defined in the column declaration instead of auto-adjusting to fill the entire grid width.
• The Image Editor component now supports:
  • Performing undo and redo operations.
  • Zooming in and out on an image using pinch gestures and ctrl + mouse wheel scrolls.

WinUI

• The new AvatarView control is a graphical representation of a user’s image. The view can be customized by adding an image, gradient background, group view, and more.
• The WinUI Scheduler control now supports:
  • Highlighting appointments when the pointer hovers over them.
  • Adjusting the number of appointments displayed in a month cell based on its size.

WinForms & WPF

• Syncfusion will no longer deliver WinForms and WPF controls in .NET frameworks 2.0 and 3.5.
• The WPF PDF Viewer now supports redesigning the built-in toolbar.
• The WPF TreeGrid allows users to asynchronously load records on-demand using the RequestTreeItems event.
• The WPF Scheduler now supports:
  • Highlighting appointments when the pointer hovers over them.
  • Adjusting the number of appointments displayed in a month cell based on its size.

Document processing libraries

.NET PDF library

The Syncfusion PDF library now allows users to:

• Extract PDF tags from an existing tagged PDF document, which improves accessibility for individuals with disabilities, such as those who use screen readers or other assistive technologies.
• Convert TIFF images to PDF in WinUI and .NET MAUI applications. It supports both single and multi-frame TIFF images.
• Enhance the appearance of QR codes by adding a company or brand logo to the center of the QR code.
• Embed the entire TrueType font in the PDF file. Previously, only characters used in the file could be embedded.
• Retrieve custom images from rubber-stamp annotations.
• Import and export annotations with their appearance in JSON format.

.NET Word library

The Syncfusion Word (DocIO) library allows users to:

• Convert an existing markdown file to a Word document and load images based on the image source path using an event while converting the markdown file to a Word document.
• Find Word document elements based on specified properties and corresponding values. For example, with this new functionality, you can find:
  • An image with an alternative text (Alt text) value of “logo”.
  • A content control with the type “plain text” and “first name” as the title.
  • Blocked content controls with “address” as the title.
  • Charts with the type “pie” and “analysis report” as the title.
• Unicode characters can be rendered when the original font and default alternate font don’t have the character glyph of the used Unicode characters in Word-to-PDF and Word-to-image conversions.

.NET Excel library

• The Syncfusion Excel (XlsIO) library can insert slicers to filter table data in Excel files. In addition to quick filtering, slicers indicate the current filtering state, making it easy to understand what is currently displayed.
• Excel-to-PDF conversion has been updated to provide the following enhancements to ensure that the Excel document’s appearance is maintained in the resultant PDF document:
  • Preservation of gradient fill for cells and shapes.
  • Preservation of cell formats that are applied through date-occurring conditional formatting.

Java Word Library

The Syncfusion Java Word (DocIO) library allows users to:

• Convert an existing markdown file to a Word document and load images based on the image source path using an event while converting the markdown file to a Word document.
• Find Word document elements based on specified properties and corresponding values. For example, with this new functionality, you can find:
  • An image with an alternative text (Alt text) value of “logo”.
  • A content control with the type “plain text” and “first name” as the title.
  • Blocked content controls with “address” as the title.
  • Charts with the type “pie” and “analysis report” as the title.

Conclusion

The features listed here are just some of the highlights of our Essential Studio 2023 Volume 1 release. You can check out all the features in our release notes and the What’s New pages.

Try out these features and share your feedback as comments on this blog. You can also reach us through our support forums, support portal, or feedback portal.

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