News Archive - 2006

The next version of iGrid.NET with new enhancements is available. The main new feature in this version is the ability to implement drag-n-drop customizable operations between two grids or inside the same grid.
The demo of iGrid.NET was also updated, and now it contains a new sample that demonstrates how you can use drag-n-drop in iGrid with some options (it is the first sample in the What's New in the Latest Versions sample group). You can borrow this code and customize it for your real-world projects!
The new release also fixes some bugs which may prevent iGrid from working properly in compiled apps or Visual Studio IDE, and we recommend that you upgrade to this version of the control if possible.

3 new extra samples were added to our online public library of source code samples for iGrid.NET. These samples gives you ready-to-use code you can use to:
  (1) Display RTF text in the iGrid cells.
  (2) Add subtotal rows automatically.
  (3) Resize rows interactively.
As always, the code is in a ready-to-use form (separate class code files) and can be easily attached to your existing grids to extend their functionality.
The classes provide you with options you can use to customize their behavior. For instance, the subtotal manager class allows you to specify the layout of subtotal rows, and the resize manager class allows you to specify what area of iGrid is responsible for interactive row resizing.

Our DocMounter utility was published with a couple of minor enhancements. Read a new What's New page for this product to know what was changed.

You can get two more products of our company, and now these are utilities for developers. The first one, DocMounter, can be used to build MS Visual Studio XML documentation files, helps and manuals for your products. The second tool, OCX Updater, is free and open-source and its main goal is to give Visual Basic 5/6 developers the ability to easily replace one ActiveX control with another in their projects.

Now in our product list we have not only components, but developer tools as well, and to simplify licensing process for all our products for you and us, we decided to introduce a new licensing policy which is unified for all the products. It is a hybrid of the previous two slightly different licensing policies for our .NET and ActiveX controls.
More over, as a part of our program of enhancing the technical support of our users, we also decided to support not only the latest major version of any of our product, but the previous major version as well because in the real world only few developers can always stay up-to-date with the latest releases of the components used in their long-term developments.
All the changes are reflected in the updated pages in the Order section at our website, and we recommend that you read them carefully. We even created a new page called "Pricing, Upgrades & Support Policy" with the general rules of our new licensing policy.

All our ActiveX controls, iGrid, xDir, CaptionX, and hTooltip got the highest award at Download3000.com.

In the latest build of iGrid.NET we fixed a couple of minor bugs. We also updated the help file - now it contains the manual in addition to the only reference to iGrid's members in the previous version (while the manual is still available as a separate electronic book you can read and print).

A minor bug that caused the form title to be drawn improperly if the form with the fixed dialog border did not have an icon was fixed in the component.

The next long-awaited major update of iGrid ActiveX was released according to the numerous requests of our customers.
The new version of the component contains many new principal features and has improved performance. Among the new features you'll find:
- Improved sorting (up to 10 times faster than in the previous version).
- The frozen columns functionality.
- A special property that returns the collection of the selected items.
- Events for dynamic row and cell formatting and getting cell text dynamically.
- A new Sys() function you can use to retrieve many useful internal parameters and counters of iGrid.
- Proper support for multi-monitor systems.
- And a lot of other important enhancements...
The total list of the changes we made in iGrid ActiveX since the previous version can be read in the 21-page (!) What's New document.

We have added a new portion of additional samples to our online Extra Samples Pack for iGrid.NET. Two of these new samples will give you ready-to-use code you can use to implement drag-n-drop and copy-n-paste functionality in your apps (the copy-n-paste code also works if you wish to copy data from iGrid.NET into MS Excel and vice versa), other samples will learn you how to create tree-like interfaces and implement a new star-rating cell in our grid.

The next version of our grid component for .NET was released. With this version we introduce iGrid.NET PrintManager, a new additional component you can use to print the contents of iGrid.NET and preview it before printing:

iGrid.NET PrintManager can be bought in addition to iGrid.NET if you need this functionality in your apps.
With this release of the component we also claim that this version and other future versions will be compatible with 64-bit versions of MS Windows and the 64-bit .NET Framework (some changes were made in the component to make it working properly in this environment). So now the component works properly on any known hardware/software Windows platform that supports the .NET Framework.

A new page that contains additional samples for iGrid.NET was published. It contains some new samples not included in the main demo, and new samples we'll be added to that page constantly as we are creating them according to the requests of our customers.

iGrid.NET won new highest awards in shareware catalogues again, and we updated the list of iGrid.NET's awards.

iGrid.NET won the highest awards in some shareware catalogs, so we decided to add a new award page for this product to our website. You can open this page to view the awards of iGrid.NET using the link below.

This update of iGrid.NET fixes one critical bug that can prevent iGrid from working properly in modal forms and contains a couple of minor enhancements in the component; the demo was also updated. Now the demo and the component work properly on monitors with different DPI's. The Cell, Column and Row Properties sample from the demo was enhanced to give you the ability to learn how the properties of iGrid work; a new link control in this sample allows you to get the on-line help on each property you change.

Our grid for .NET has been updated. The latest release (build 0021) fixes some bugs, a couple of them are related to the right-to-left mode.

Now the iGrid.NET demo is redistributed with the source code written in the two most popular .NET languages - one in C# and the other in VB.NET. Many .NET developers like or even know only one of these languages, and we decided to let them the ability to examine the source code in the favorite language.
A couple of minor bugs were fixed in the latest build of the component, and one enhancement was implemented in it too.

We gathered the responses about our iGrid ActiveX and published them on a new People Say page in the section devoted to iGrid.

One minor bug that prevents the form title from being drawn properly if the form does not have the control box was fixed in the component.

One of our ActiveX control, xDir Library, won the highest award at Downloads45.com

You can download and install the updated demo of iGrid.NET 1.5 that includes the latest build of this control (#0016). The demo contains a new sample that demonstrates how you can use iGrid in multi-threading environment (add rows to it from different threads). The demo's installation package also supports Visual Studio 2005 now - it automatically creates a tab in the Toolbox for the iGrid control and its nested objects available in the Windows Forms Designer.
The control was improved and redesigned to make it possible to use it in the Windows Forms Designer in the MS VC++ environment (the previous builds of the control cannot be used there because of some internal unknown errors in VS).

This latest build of iGrid implements the IObjectSafety COM interface used by many well-known programs to detect whether an ActiveX control is safe for scripting (among them are Internet Explorer, MS Word and Excel). For instance, MS Excel displays a warning box if the ActiveX control is not safety ("This application is about to initialize ActiveX controls that might be unsafe…"), and you should confirm in that box (i.e. press the OK button) that the control is safety and you are going to work with it. Now iGrid implements IObjectSafety with proper settings to avoid these annoying messages in your VBA, DHTML and other applications in which the environment is watching what ActiveX controls you use.
Two minor bugs were also fixed in this build.

This sample pack was updated and now it contains 39 additional samples of the iGrid usage. The new samples which were added to this set are:
- ColoredScrollBar: demonstrates how you can change the color of the shaded shaft in an iGrid scroll bar.
- GetSelectedRows: this code demonstrates how to get the list of the currently selected rows in huge grids. Works fast even if iGrid has 100'000+ rows!
- HourglassOnSort: displays an hourglass cursor while you sort iGrid with a large amount of rows (not a simple task if you wish to change the mouse pointer from a VB6 ActiveX control during long time operation).
- WinAmpStyledDraggingExt: improves the original sample that implements WinAmp-styled dragging in iGrid. Works better, faster and allows you to work with grids with several columns.
The ExcelCopyPaste sample was also improved and renamed to CopyPasteInclExcel. Now it does not erase cells between non-adjacent selected cells in copy/paste operations, supports the CTRL+C/CTRL+V keyboard combinations and allows you to copy/paste cells inside the same grid too.