SRP ActiveX Controls 3.1.1 Released

It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally posted an new release of SRP ActiveX Controls. For customers with a Pro license (those using SRPControls.ocx), the new release number is 3.1.1. For those of you with individual control licenses, note that each OCX file has it’s own version number. Visit our download page to compare version numbers with your own to make sure you’re up to date.

Here is a breakdown of what has changed. Only significant features are mentioned. For a complete list of improvements, including bug fixes, see the SRP ActiveX Controls version history.

General

Every control has been updated in two areas. First, we discovered that Visual Studio 2013 compiles our controls in such a way as to make them unusable in XP. This is due to a super secret default setting. Once we discovered the subterfuge, we changed the settings in Visual Studio 2013 to ensure XP is still supported across all controls. To be safe, we made sure to recompile all controls, even ones that have no other changes.

Second, we encountered some slowdown in OpenInsight and spent hours trying to isolate the issue. During that time we discovered in certain cases, OI will be spammed by the WM_NCHITTEST windows message. This message might mean little to some of you, but it is what the SRP ActiveX Controls used to achieve a lot of the fancy hover effects our controls are known for. Since many of the SRP ActiveX Controls update their visuals during this message, it should be no surprise that if WM_NCHITTEST gets spammed for unknown reasons things slow down really fast. The solution was to move the WM_NCHITTEST logic for all controls into the WM_MOUSEMOVE windows message instead.

New Themes

This release includes some new themes for a few of our theme-aware controls. The “Office 2013” theme was added to the SRP DatePicker Control, SRP Popup Control, and SRP ShortcutBar Control. The SRP ShortcutBar Control also got the “Visual Studio 2013 Light” and “Visual Studio 2013 Dark” themes. These controls already had themes for Office 2010 and Office 2007, but to our shame were not fully documented. Alas, this has been corrected. To see all available themes for each control, click on the hyperlinks above.

SRP Schedule Control

The SRP Schedule Control has gotten a lot of new features. It’s now possible to show additional information on an appointment using the AppRect property and OnApptHover event. We like to use the SRP Popup Control as fancy tooltips. Time blocks, which are colored segments of time, have been redesigned. They used to be fixed to a given entity and would appear on all dates no matter what. Now they can be treated much like appointments. See the TimeBlockList property to get started. Conflict detection now comes with options which can be set with the ConflictBehavior property. You can now enable Guides that appear as the user drags an appointment. Lastly, you can finally rearrange your groups and entities with the RepositionItem method.

Looking to the Future

A lot of things were accomplished with this release, but it was still mostly maintenance with some improvements here and there. Lest you think we’ve lost ambition, we do have new controls lined up for our next release, which is currently planned to be 3.2. Stay tuned to this blog for announcements.