XAF - Application Performance and Improved Usability (Coming soon in v17.1)

In this post, I'd like to highlight a few of the more interesting enhancements we've made to XAF in this release cycle.

Platform Agnostic Notifications 

You can now display notifications to users (e.g. confirmation messages, warnings, errors) with ease by calling the new platform-independent ShowViewStrategyBase.ShowMessage method. Depending on method parameters and target platform, your message can be represented by Outlook-like alerts, Windows 10-like toast windows or flyout panels (all powered by DevExpress WinForms Controls and/or DevExtreme HTML 5 widgets). A typical example will look something like this: 

public class ProjectTaskController : ViewController {//… 
    MessageOptions options = new MessageOptions();
    options.Duration = 2000;
    options.Message = string.Format("{0} task(s) have been completed!", e.SelectedObjects.Count);
    options.Type = InformationType.Success;
    options.Web.Position = InformationPosition.Bottom;
    options.Win.Caption = "Success";
    options.Win.Type = WinMessageType.Toast;
    Application.ShowViewStrategy.ShowMessage(options);
}

Here are a couple of examples of the UX within Windows and XAF's Web UI:

You can play with this feature in our FeatureCenter. This feature has been successfully test-driven since its initial preview in v16.2.5. v17.1 includes enhancements based on customer requests and offers improved stability due to extended test coverage. Be sure to visit Concepts > UI Construction > Text Notifications to learn more about possible customizations and usage limits.

Optimized controller creation in ListPropertyEditor for detail collections

With this release, XAF powered applications with numerous Controllers associated with detail collections load faster. That is possible because we no longer instantiate non-activated View Controllers due to TargetViewType, TargetViewNesting, TargetObjectType or TargetViewId restrictions. This optimization is automatically enabled in newly generated XAF v17.1 apps. In apps created using older XAF versions, you can set the XafApplication > OptimizedControllersCreation property manually.

The second screenshot (B) illustrates where this improvement will be the most noticeable - a huge application with hundreds of Controllers:

High DPI improvements

In v17.1, desktop apps powered by XAF will offer a consistent appearance across a wide variety of high-DPI display settings. Your WinForms XAF applications will now be scaled correctly when setting the scaling factor (change text size, app and other item options) to a value greater than 100%. To enable the High DPI support, add the 'app.manifest' file to your project and enable the 'dpiAware' option. DPI-aware scaling is also enabled in XAF design-time tools.

Other important changes

Finally, I'd like to repost information from XAF's "Breaking Changes" section. Though not breaking changes, they are important things to consider for every single XAF user:

# BC4063 - More secure password generation algorithms for built-in security system classes are available in XAF v16.2 and v17.1
Refer to the FIPS-compliance changes to the DevExpress.Persistent.Base.PasswordCryptographer and DevExpress.ExpressApp.Utils.ImageLoader classes KB Article for additional information.

# BC4062 - The Frame.GetController<ControllerType> method may return null when the XafApplication.OptimizedControllersCreation property is set to true
XAF Solution Wizard now sets the XafApplication.OptimizedControllersCreation property to true for newly generated XAF projects. To avoid possible null reference exceptions in nested List Views, always check whether the Frame.GetController<ControllerType> method result is not null when the OptimizedControllersCreation property is true.

# BC4038 - WebLayoutManager - Initialization and usage of LayoutItemTemplateContainerBase descendants has been changed
Refer to the Web Layout Manager improvements and important changes in XAF v17.1 KB Article for additional information.