Terry,

The design loading speed seems to be related with our designer extension that populates the controls property with description and proper attributes. It doesn't seem to have relation with the control performance itself.

This automatically justifies the performance when compared with non ClientUI pages or with other vendors controls as they haven't implemented designer extension yet, AFAIK.

If you can live without the property description and specific attributes like category, this may speed up the designer loading. Let me know if this is desirable and we may provide an option to disable the extension in the upcoming release.

Hope this helps,
Jimmy

Hi Terry,

That's cool. Yep, you can always use the Prism bit whenever needed. Although having EA built-in will eliminate the need to reference to other unnecessary assemblies, thus saving the bits further.

Thanks,
Jimmy.

Chris,

Thanks for sharing more information about the scenarios that you're trying to achieve.

We've exactly the same thought with you when our team designed the UXDesktopDock - something that behaves like a Windows 7 taskbar. However, the UXDesktopDock in this release resembles more to the Apple's Dock behaviors and functionality, which is geared toward simplicity and ease-of-use.

I'm pretty sure that the "instance button" that grouped by app, and "multiple groups" within an "instance button" should be feasible to be done through customizations and events handling. You can eventually use the stack menu capability to simulate the "multiple groups" when hover on one of the instance button.

And yes, you can also drag something and drop it into the button at the task bar, then do your own logic to process the drop event, i.e, add the dropped item as a stack menu item. However, this will require you to really master the drag-drop concept in our ClientUI library. You can see that we already introduce a powerful "Transformable UI" concept where an item can have multiple UI representation according to where it's dropped. I suggest you to read Drag-drop Framework Overview to learn further.

Things that I'm not sure is how far you want to take your application to. I.e, what would you do to indicate a pinned application? That would require you to customize the control completely to achieve the desired behaviors/features.

The other possibility is that, if the market demand is decent enough, it might be possible for us to look deeper into this particular behavior and wrap them up to a specialized Windows 7 task bar control. This might cover the stuff such as built-in multiple group support, preview support, application pinning support and more.

Hope this helps,
Jimmy

Chris,

Thanks for explaining your requirements.

I completely understood the type of applications that you're building. We did put in some apps prototype while designing the controls to ensure we covered most scenarios.

Technically, the stack button is already a hierarchical-friendly control, which means you can insert any number of nested buttons. However, we didn't manage to put in the visual/presentation implementation for the Grid stack mode in the release as we've throw-in too much features.

The good news is that you can use the Menu mode for your stack button. That will allow you to show nested items for your requirement above. To learn more about the stack mode and how to configure it, see StackMode Property.

Let me know if that works for you.

Thanks,
Jimmy

Hi Richard,

Thank you for your reply and feedback.

We will change the required role implementation to an "or" logic in the upcoming hotfix (should be due next week).

Yes, the property can be databound to a view model. You simply need to have a property in your view model that describes the required role for the page, then bind that property to the RequiredRole property of the UXPage. This should be similar to the basic implementation in MVVM pattern.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Hope this helps,
Jimmy