Forums | NoesisGUI

I've been evaluating NoesisGUI for the past few days, and I love what I'm seeing so far. I have a few items that I've missed from the traditional WPF/Silverlight experience, things that I think would make NoesisGUI an even more complete framework. I'm guessing some of these things are already on your roadmap, or will be included in the final release. It'd be cool to hear how high priority you place them.

Some of these features I believe would be possible using the C++ API directly, but I didn't see a way to access them via the C# API in Unity. Maybe it would be possible via a native plugin?

• PropertyMetaData should be PropertyMetadata to match the WPF convention.
• Would it be possible to make the proxy classes expose properties instead of Get/Set methods?
• Property change/validation callbacks for dependency properties.
• Custom panel layouts via Measure/Arrange pattern in WPF.
  • Nice for breaking out of the ordinary layout patterns (Animated wrap panels, spaced stack panels, etc)
• Custom markup extensions for things like localization. (http://10rem.net/blog/2011/03/09/creati ... ilverlight)
  • Could use converters on bindings for a similar result,
• Access to OpenType font features via Typography attached property. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms745109.aspx)
  • Unlock all features a font has to offer. Must have for designers.

Matt has a pretty good list there. Personally, I would prioritize them pretty close to the order he has them in. Perhaps custom layout panels would be a bit higher in my view.

I forgot to mention DataTriggers, though most of their purposes could be implemented with dependency properties and regular Triggers. DataTriggers and MultiDataTriggers allow for complex UI logic to be encoded in pure XAML. With the current system, a view model would have to encode that logic, and expose a flag or something similar reflecting the state in a dependency property.

Not so bad, but it makes designers have to rely on programmers more often. More of a "nice to have" feature. I believe Silverlight doesn't use them, so it's not a high priority by any means.

Hi!

First of all thanks for the positive feedback. After all the energy put on this software, seeing that people start to like it is rewarding.

PropertyMetaData typo will be fixed in the patch being uploaded tomorrow.

OpenType features via Typography attached properties is something we don't have in our roadmap, but will study to include it in a future major release.

The rest of features are implemented in C++ but yet not exposed to C# in unity. Problem is that we are using an automatic tool for exposing C++ classes to mono (http://www.swig.org/) and at the end this process have been quite unsatisfactory. But well, it is the first step towards what we want to achieve. Our idea is eliminating the swig tool completely and do the parser completely on our side to expose the 100% of functionality we have in the native world to unity. If we had done that the v1.0 of NoesisGui would have accumulated more delays and that is something we didn't want. So we opted for releasing this first approach while we are working in the next solution.

After v1.0 is really out (it is almost there) we will start organizing the roadmaps for v1.1 v1.2.. all these things are max priority (with the dx11 renderer, linux port, 64 bits version...) and everybody that acquires v1.0 will receive it for free.

Regards.

Thanks for the update! Good to hear.

I forgot to mention DataTriggers, though most of their purposes could be implemented with dependency properties and regular Triggers. DataTriggers and MultiDataTriggers allow for complex UI logic to be encoded in pure XAML. With the current system, a view model would have to encode that logic, and expose a flag or something similar reflecting the state in a dependency property.

Not so bad, but it makes designers have to rely on programmers more often. More of a "nice to have" feature. I believe Silverlight doesn't use them, so it's not a high priority by any means.

Just to clarify, DataTriggers is a feature we have left out of 1.0 version, it is not available for the C++ API nor in Unity integration. But we will include it in following updates.