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We are pleased to announce that we have been working very hard to support several new platforms in Catel: Xamarin.Android Xamarin.iOS Windows Phone 8.1 (Silverlight) Windows Phone 8.1 (Windows Runtime) As most libraries choose to support all platforms via PCL (Portable Class Libraries), Catel uses a different approach by implement a platform-specific assembly for each platform. Though this might sound crazy, this brings several advantages to Catel which are not available in other platforms. Introducing “true PCL” Portable Class Libraries (PCL) is a technique where developers can develop a single assembly that can be used by multiple platforms. The reason the team decided not to use PCL is that it… read more →

Today we released Catel 3.9.0. This post describes the most important changes. For a detailed list, see the full release notes. To get the latest bits of Catel, please update via NuGet or get the setup package at GitHub. Added multilingual support (also via bindings) Support for multilingual applications has been on our wish list for a long time. In this release we finally found time to actually implement this feature. To bind to resource files which are determined dynamically, simply use the following xaml:

For more information, see the documentation. Improved handling of unloading of nested views In previous versions of Catel it was possible that multiple dummy… read more →

Today we have released Catel.Fody 1.7.0. This is mostly a maintenance release and provides the following changes. Validate for automatic change notifications Catel.Fody already weaves regular properties with matching methods into Catel properties with change notifications:

However, when a user accidentally added parameters to the method, it would cause invalid runtime issues:

The new version of Catel.Fody will show a warning and give the developer two options: 1) Rename the method to get rid of the warning and remove accidental usage of the method (which is not intented by the developer) 2) Remove the parameters and cause the method to be called automatically Add support for generic properties… read more →

It has been a long time since we last released a version of Catel.Fody. In the past few months, we have been working very hard to add new features and combine smart functionality in Catel to allow users to get the best out of Catel. This blog post will describe the most important changes in Catel.Fody 1.6. The reason that the new release took so long is because Catel.Fody is fully refactored under the hood, which allows us to add new features in the future in a modular way. Weaving properties Before Catel.Fody 1.6, weaving of properties was pretty basic. It was only possible to automatically weave any auto-property to… read more →

Most commands are registered per view and available per view model. Some commands (such as commands on a Ribbon or Toolbar) are application-wide. Catel supports both types, and this blog post explains how to use the ICommandManager to work with application-wide commands such as Refresh with a key bound to F5. Note that this information is based on the latest nightly build, this functionality will be included in Catel 3.9.0 Introduction to CommandManager There is no generic way to specify application-wide commands in WPF and Silverlight. To overcome this issue, Catel introduces the CommandManager. This manager allows to create commands which are hosted by the CommandManager. The commands on the… read more →

Today we released Catel 3.8.1. This is a hotfix release and contains a single change: Prism Extension throws exception for non-existing NuGet catalogs

Today we released Catel 3.8.0. This post describes the most important changes. For a detailed list, see the full release notes. To get the latest bits of Catel, please update via NuGet or get the setup package at GitHub. IoC components improvements Several improvements were made to the IoC components in Catel. The IoC components are ServiceLocator, TypeFactory and DependencyResolver. The first feature is that Catel now allows registration and resolving of generic types. This means that one can now register an open generic type like IDictionary<,> and resolve it as IDictionary<string, int> The second change is that Catel internally uses the IDependencyResolver instead of ServiceLocator to resolve types from… read more →

A common request we get from new users of Catel is that it might be hard to understand the basics at first sight. The last few weeks we have been working very hard to provide several options for developers with every level of experience. Getting started guide For beginners, we have written a full getting started guide where the reader is guided to create a very basic application which handles the following aspects of Catel and MVVM in general: Creating a project from scratch Creating models Implementing serialization Creating view models Creating views (both user controls and windows) Additional features such as validation, event triggers and a live search function… read more →

When developing Catel, we always try to keep as much platforms supported as possible. At the time of the Catel 3.7 release, the following platforms were supported: NET40 NET45 Silverlight 4 Silverlight 5 Windows Phone 7.x Windows Phone 8 WinRT 8.0 Portable Class Libraries Starting with Catel 3.8, the following platforms will be dropped: Silverlight 4 Windows Phone 7.x The following new platform will be supported in the new version: WinRT 8.1 Recently Microsoft has officially stopped supporting Silverlight 4. They will maintain Silverlight 5 until 2021 (source). This means that Catel will no longer support Silverlight 4 starting with Catel 3.8. In a recent poll we noted that a… read more →

As you might have noticed, we brought the website of Catel to a new level of professionalism. The reason is that we want to provide a quality framework with Catel. In the past we provided quality based on these factors: Short release cycles Documentation in confluence Xml documentation in code With the new website the following new factors will be added: News and blog posts which will be updated regularly Ability to subscribe to news and blog posts via RSS or a newsletter Commercial support options News and blog posts A few weeks back, we put out a poll on how the Catel team should reach out to you. The… read more →