The Development Experience
ClientUI enables you to take full advantage of the underlying power of the platform
and focuses on helping you deliver rich and scalable application architecture in
less time. The vast array of UI controls in ClientUI is designed for impressive
visual development experience with extended design-time support on Microsoft Visual
Studio 2010 and Expression Blend 4.
Streamlined Development
ClientUI enables a closer collaboration between developer and designer by enabling
them to do what they best at. Developers use Visual Studio 2010 to code the business
logic, while designers use Expression Blend 4 to design the user-friendly interface
and the experience aspects of the application. This ensures the final project quality,
a powerful business application with professional looking interface.
Toolbox and Assets Registrations
Starting from the installation, ClientUI configures your IDE to get you ready for
development. Each control is automatically registered to Visual Studio Toolbox and
Expression Blend Assets under Intersoft ClientUI tab group.
WYSIWYG Design Experience
Rapidly take your application from design to prototype to commercial-ready in WYSIWYG
fashion. Drag drop an instance of the control to the designer surface and even resize
it to fit your application estate. Every control comes with professionally finished
style, similar to Windows Aero. You can also use Microsoft Expression Blend to tweak
the design further and it will be reflected in Visual Studio 2010 immediately.
Purely Visual Development
With ClientUI, you can develop better and faster without even looking at the XAML
code. Interact with any user interface element directly on Visual Studio and Expression
Blend designer surface. For example: you can actually select a menu item hosted
inside a menu bar control, and expand the menu item to see the inside submenu. If
you are using working with UXWindow, you can switch between window objects in design
time, just like in the runtime. Additionally, use the Document Outline to view the
entire layout structure and move between elements quickly.
Context Menu
ClientUI adds a time-saving feature to aid your development with controls like UXMenuBar,
UXToolBar, UXDropDown, and more. The designer’s context menu feature contains a
number of actions related to the selected controls. For example, select and right
click on a UXToolGroup control will show additional commands for adding a new button,
a new separator, or a new image button.
Smart Item Placement
ClientUI extends its designer capability to take advantage of Visual Studio 2010’s
item placement feature. Based on the current selected item, you can quickly add
multiple objects and Visual Studio will position them correctly. Consider a scenario
where you want to have a toolbar with 5 buttons. With Smart Item Placement, you
can use copy-paste to create 5 toolbar buttons. Visual Studio will arrange the objects
accordingly – saving you from layout nightmare.
Layout Adorner
ClientUI simplifies the tedious layouting tasks with its Layout Adorner feature.
It is a sophisticated designer feature in Visual Studio and Expression Blend that
displays a visual cue to allow you easily interact and layout the user interface
elements. When you select a DockPanel instance, you will notice the helpful cue
indicating the dock position of the currently selected element. Click on the cue
to move it around.
Default Content
Default Content is an interesting feature which prefills the control’s content recently
dragged from the toolbox. When you drag and drop a UXToolBar control, two UXToolBarButtons
within a UXToolGroup will be created. This feature allows you to quickly understand
the control structure and what to do next, edit the existing item or add more UXToolBarButtons.
Property Category and Description
ClientUI adds an intuitive designer extension that logically divides each control’s
massive properties into understandable category.
Project Templates
ClientUI is also shipped with dozens of line-of-business project templates to help
you get started faster. Combined with the rich development experience and rapidly
ship deliver dozens of commercial projects with no delay.
Learn more how you can accelerate your development with ClientUI in Visual Studio 2010 and in Expression Blend 4.