Syncfusion Essential Studio® 2024 Volume 3 Is Here!

Hurray! Syncfusion has launched its third major release of the year: Essential Studio® 2024 Volume 3. Packed with highly anticipated new controls, powerful features, and AI-driven enhancements, this release promises to elevate your development experience. Let’s dive into the remarkable new additions across each platform!

.NET MAUI

• In the 2024 Volume 3 release, we introduce the following two new .NET MAUI components in preview mode:
  • Kanban: A visual management tool that helps teams track and manage work in progress. It provides an organized view of tasks as each one moves through different stages, making it simpler to track progress.
  • AI AssistView: Enhances interaction between users and AI services. It provides a customizable, user-friendly interface for creating intelligent, responsive apps with AI services.
• The DataGrid control now allows users to reorder rows directly within the UI using the row drag-drop feature.
• The TreeMap drill-down support allows users to explore hierarchical data interactively by navigating through its levels.
• The Calendar control now supports:
  • Template for headers: To customize the appearance and functionality of the headers.
  • Adjacent month navigation: To navigate to the previous or next month by tapping the leading or trailing month date in the Calendar.
  • Strike through: Improved the blackout dates UI in the Calendar by implementing the strikethrough effect.
• The Cartesian Charts control now supports three new series types:
  • Stacked line series: Displays multiple line series stacked on top of each other to represent cumulative data trends, offering a clear comparison of multiple datasets over time.
  • 100% stacked line series: Similar to the stacked line, but it displays data as contributions to a whole, with each category’s value represented as a fraction of the total value.
  • Spline range area series: Provides a smooth, curved area chart that represents the range between values across a series, enhancing clarity in data trends.
• The Scheduler control now supports date navigation using the built-in calendar date picker in the scheduler header.

Flutter

• The Flutter platform introduces the new Chat widget in preview mode. It is a customizable chat interface designed for one-on-one or group conversations. It provides extensive customization options, allowing developers to modify the appearance and behavior of chat bubbles, the input composer, action buttons, and more.
• The Flutter Charts widget delivers the following new axes enhancements:
  • Customize start/end plot offsets: Individually set padding (In pixels) at the start and end of an axis.
  • Range padding: Individually specify range padding at the start and end of an axis. The following enum values have been added to ChartRangePadding:
    1. additionalStart
    2. additionalEnd
    3. roundStart
    4. roundEnd

• The PDF Viewer widget now supports adding, removing, and modifying sticky note annotations. Users can add comments or notes to specific parts of a document to clarify complex concepts or terms.

Blazor

• In this release, the Blazor suite introduces the following new components in preview mode:
  • AI AssistView
  • MultiColumn ComboBox
• The OTP Input and TextArea components met industry standards and are now marked as production-ready.
• Added fluent 2.0 high contrast theme to our Syncfusion Blazor components.
• Upgraded our Bootstrap 5.0 theme to Bootstrap 5.3.
• The Diagram Library is improved by automatic flowchart creation, built-in CRUD actions, and the ability to generate mind maps and flowchart diagrams directly from Mermaid syntax data.
• The Gantt Chart supports exporting to PDF and offers touch interaction support for zooming.

Essential JS 2

• In the 2024 Volume 3 release, we introduce the following Essential JS 2 components in preview mode:
  • Smart Paste Button: This innovative button simplifies form-filling by automatically pulling content from the clipboard, using AI to match form fields.
  • Smart TextArea: An advanced input area offering context-aware autocomplete suggestions using AI, designed to enhance productivity.
  • AI AssistView: A user-friendly interface incorporating AI services with toolbars, prompt suggestions, and customizable views.
• The following components met the industry standards and are now marked as production-ready:
  • MultiColumn ComboBox
  • OTP Input
• You can enjoy the following enhanced theming support:
  • Fluent 2 high contrast theme: All Angular components now support high-contrast mode, adhering to Fluent 2 design guidelines.
  • Bootstrap 5.3 theme upgrade: Syncfusion Angular components now leverage Bootstrap 5.3, offering improved styling and features.
• The Barcode Generator supports adding logos to QR codes, keeping them visually appealing and scannable.
• The Charts component delivers the following user-friendly features:
  • Sort animation: Smooth transitions when sorting data.
  • Zooming and panning animations: Fluid animations while zooming or panning.
  • Stepline without risers: Customize step lines without risers for a cleaner appearance.
  • Accumulation Charts: There are new options to apply rounded corners to pie, donut, pyramid, and funnel charts and new pattern options for visual customization.
• The Rich Text Editor has gained powerful new features, making content creation smoother:
  • Slash menu: Easily apply formatting or execute commands by typing / within the editor.
  • Inline code: Highlight snippets, commands, or keywords for quick reference.
  • Import/export: Effortlessly export content to PDF or Word or import Word documents for editing within the editor.
• The new features of Diagram Library are as follows:
  • Flowchart automatic layout: Automatically generate well-arranged flowcharts.
  • Mermaid syntax support: Import and export diagrams using Mermaid syntax for better integration with other tools.
• You can enjoy the following new features in the Word Processor:
  • XML mapped content controls: Automate document updates with XML data mapping.
  • Shape support: Preserve shapes in Word documents, like flowcharts, arrows, and stars.
• The Image Editor supports the following new features:
  • Redact support: Blur or pixelate sensitive image areas for privacy protection.
  • Text and rectangle annotation enhancements: Improved customization options for annotating images.
• We’ve made significant performance improvements in the PDF Viewer:
  • Faster loading: Large PDFs now load faster thanks to the improved handling of Base64 strings.
  • Search enhancements: Search for multiple words with the Match Any Word feature and view search result counts alongside the current search index.

WinForms

• The Bullet Graph and Smith Chart controls support adding smart tags. This provides instant access to frequently used operations and configurations within the design interface.
• The DataContract Serializer support for Diagram Library enables users to save and load diagrams and symbol palettes in XML format. Using DataContract serialization, the diagram’s structure, including its shapes, connections, and styles, can be serialized into XML for storage or transfer. Later, the serialized XML can be deserialized to reconstruct the diagram or symbol palette, ensuring that users can persist and restore their work seamlessly across sessions or different environments.

WPF

• The PDF Viewer’s find text functionality has been significantly enhanced with the integration of PDFium. This improvement results in a more accurate and reliable text retrieval when searching within PDF documents. This enhancement is particularly beneficial for extracting specific data from PDF reports, such as financial figures or customer information. The increased accuracy of text search reduces the likelihood of errors, ensuring that critical data is retrieved quickly and correctly.
• The Surface Chart now supports various built-in themes, allowing users to customize its appearance.

WinUI

• The new WinUI AI AssistView (Preview) control enhances interaction between users and AI services, providing a customizable, user-friendly interface for creating intelligent and responsive apps.
• The DataGrid now includes the AutoFitRange property, which allows us to determine whether column auto-sizing should be calculated based on all rows or only the visible rows.

Document processing Libraries

.NET PDF Library

The Syncfusion .NET PDF Library now supports the following enhancements:

• Enhancements in Arabic script rendering: Users can render Arabic text with the following extended character support for specific blocks:

• • Extended – A

• • Extended – B

• • Extended – C

• • Presentation Forms – A
  • Presentation Forms – B
• Circular annotations with cloud-border style: We can apply cloud-border style to circular annotations in PDFs. This makes it easier to emphasize key information, highlight important sections, and make annotations visually distinctive. It’s beneficial in educational materials, technical documentation, design reviews, and collaborative business documents where clear communication is essential.
• Image cropping in HTML-to-image conversion: During the HTML-to-image conversion process, you can crop specific regions of a converted image. This allows for the precise extraction of relevant content, such as isolating key visuals or focusing on particular web page sections for reports or presentations.
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.NET Word Library

The .NET Word Library delivers the following features:

• WordArt in DOCX: The .NET Word Library now preserves WordArt effects like shadows, reflections, glows, bevels, 3D rotations, and transformations in DOCX files, ensuring that decorative text retains its appearance.
• HTML conversion enhancements:
  • HTML-to-Word conversion: The .NET Word Library now supports HTML files that do not follow XML standards, offering greater flexibility in HTML-to-Word conversions. Users can now more effectively handle HTML files with non-standard tags or structures.
  • RTL text preservation: RTL (right-to-left) text is accurately preserved during HTML-to-Word and Word-to-HTML conversions. Users can now convert HTML files containing the RTL text, and the text direction formatting remains consistent.
• Word-to-PDF or image conversion enhancements:
  • Performance: Conversion of large Word documents (above 1,000 pages) with tables and hyperlinks to PDFs or images is now up to 25x faster, reducing processing time from hours to minutes.
  • RTL text preservation: RTL (right-to-left) text within track changes balloons is now accurately preserved during Word-to-PDF conversions.
  • Table rendering: Rendering of tables with keep with next settings on multi-column pages during Word-to-PDF and image conversions preserves the layout as it is in the input file.
  • Metafile image preservation: The EMF images in the Word documents are now properly preserved during PDF or image conversion.

.NET Excel Library

The .NET Excel Library now supports the following new features:

• The Excel-to-PDF conversion enhancements:
  • Tagged PDFs: Converting Excel documents to PDF files with PDF/UA standard compliance is now supported. This ensures that users who rely on accessibility tools can read the content of these PDF documents.
  • Metafile image preservation: The EMF images in Excel documents are now preserved in Excel-to-PDF conversion.
• Performance improvement: The Syncfusion .NET Excel Library’s performance is improved by 30% for reading cell values from Excel documents. The time taken to read cell values for an Excel document containing data for 100,000 rows and 200 columns is reduced from 22 seconds to 16 seconds.
• Import XML maps: You can add XML maps to Excel documents. This feature allows users to select and map the fields to the worksheet range.

.NET PowerPoint Library

You can enjoy the following new features in the .NET PowerPoint Library while converting the PowerPoint-to-PDF and image formats:

• Color transformation for images: Recolored images are now accurately preserved in PowerPoint-to-PDF and image conversions, maintaining the visual appearance of custom-colored graphics and logos for clear branding.
• Metafile image preservation: The EMF images in the PowerPoint presentations are now properly preserved during PDF or image conversion.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! The features listed here are just highlights of our Essential Studio® 2024 Volume 3 release. You can check out all the features in our Release Notes and What’s New pages.

Try out these features and share your feedback as comments on this blog. You can also reach us through our support forums, support portal, or feedback portal.