I’ve spent the last week fixing all the outstanding bugs that I could reproduce. Here are just three of the more important ones.
Slow Design Time Performance
When using many Krypton controls on a Form the design time experience can slow down dramatically. Even worse it can become pretty much unusable when you have many containers with many controls inside them. This is not an uncommon scenario as many applications have a Navigator for displaying multiple pages and then each page contains many child controls.
The root of the problem was the helper glyph that is presented on container controls such as the KryptonGroup, KryptonGroupHeader, KryptonNavigator etc. This glyph appears in the bottom right hand corner of the container and allows the developer to click the glyph to select the container control. This is handy when you KryptonGroup has a border of just 1 pixel and so requires you to click exactly that 1 pixel wide area to select the group control. Unfortunately this glyph implementation at design time was causing the horrible performance hit.
So version 2.6 has removed the glyph selection feature entirely in order to remove the performance problem. As an alternative way of selecting controls at design time I recommend you use the View -> Other Windows -> Document Outline display. This window problems a TreeView that allows you to see the hierarchy of controls on the Form and selection of a control by clicking the tree node of interest.
TextBox Usage on MDI Child Forms
When placing TextBox and some other controls onto an MDI child form the controls are not always usable. In particular you might have noticed that right clicking the TextBox does not show the context menu that you would normally expect. This has been fixed so that MDI child forms working correctly.
GDI Object Leak
If you create a KryptonForm derived Form and then show and dispose of it there is a GDI object leak of two handles. Although only a small leak this can add up when you applications makes extensive use of windows and runs for a long period of time. This leak has been fixed.
There are quite a few other fixes but these three are the current highlights. Check out the release notes when the latest version is installed in order to see a definitive list of all new features and bugs fixed.
August 27th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
About the first paragraph: if I use a KryptonNavigator with multiple pages, I create a UserControl for each page. This makes it a lot easier to manage, faster, and it tends to screw up the Visual Designer less. I’ve experienced that the designer is a bit buggy and sometimes crashes, destroying your design.
Another tip for selecting a KryptonGroup (or any parent control): right click any control and in the context menu you can find a ‘Select X’ menu item for each of the ancestors.