I think it is fair to say the initial response to the new website design was less than enthusiastic. To some extent this is because many people do not like change and the new site is definitely a significant change over the old site. Also I would agree with many of the comments about the font family and size not being very good.

So I have just finished updating the site so that most people viewing using Windows will see the “Segoe UI” font. This might seem an odd choice but remember I am selling components to Windows developers and so the vast majority are going to be viewing the site from a Windows machine with that font installed. It falls back to using Tahoma if you do not have that font installed.

Let me know what you think of the latest update. If you could split your comments between the main site, the blog area and the forums area that would be good. Maybe you like some areas but not the others?

I mentioned a few months ago that a new website design was in the process. Well finally the process is complete and the new site us up and live!

The actual content of the site is essentially unchanged at the moment. I intend to create new webcasts and new sets of images in the new few weeks as time allows. Let me know if you spot any teething problems such as broken links.

It seems I cannot get away without having button specs on the new columns. So I’ve added a ButtonSpecs collection to the column class of each of the following types…

• DateTimePicker
• MaskedTextBox
• NumericUpDown
• DomainUpDown
• ComboBox

Here you can see a couple of example images…

To make life a little easier for the developer I have added a ButtonSpecClick event onto the columns that is fired whenever any button spec is clicked for any cell in that column. This event has parameters that made it easy to get hold of the column, cell and button spec instances involved in that click. Stops you needing to walk around the data structures finding your way from the button spec to the cell and then the column, which although not hard is certainly a pain to work out each time you need to do it.

Note that there are no button specs on the already defined Krypton columns  TextBox/CheckBox/Button/Link. This is because they work in a different way that makes it impractical to add them. All the new columns have an instance of an actual control that is used when editing the cell. So when you click on a numeric column it uses a KryptonNumericUpDown instance perform the drawing and editing. As the KryptonNumericUpDown already has support for button specs this makes it possible to add that capability by moving the button specs from the column collection into the control for the duration of editing. But the TextBox/CheckBox/Button/Link columns all perform drawing by using direct calls to the renderer and adding extra code to simulate the presence of buttons is not a pleasant thought.

I thought the MaskedTextBox column would be the last addition for the DataGridView but it seems there is more interest in columns than I anticipated. I was trying to think of other useful ones. Would a column for editing a colour be useful? Does anyone actually need to do this at the moment? What data type is the column itself?

Apart from a drop button and colour column what others are people in need of? I cannot promise to add what people request but if it sounds generally useful and not overly time consuming to add then I will certainly consider it.

Our final addition in a series of new column types allows a KryptonMaskedTextBox to be used for displaying and editing cells values. Here you can see two columns using the new column… 

I setup the first column with a mask of “(99) 9999-9999″ and the second is defined to use the system password character in order to hide the underlying text value. Using the masked text box is a great way of achieving a formatted appearance to underlying string values and also ensuring the user can only enter valid values.