What's New in Essential Studio^® for WinUI Controls

AI Assist View (New)

The WinUI AI Assist View control enhances interaction between users and AI services, providing a customizable, user-friendly interface for creating intelligent and responsive applications.

Key features:

• Suggestions: Offers selectable response suggestions to expedite the conversation flow.
• Typing indicator: Displays a loading indicator to represent asynchronous communication with AI services.
• Formatted responses: Visualizes responses using customizable templates.
• Styling: Allows customization of the appearance of both request and response items.
• UI Virtualization: Optimizes performance for handling large conversations.

DataGrid

Column auto-sizing for visible rows

The DataGrid now includes the AutoFitRange property, which allows you to determine whether column auto-sizing is calculated based on all rows or only the visible rows.

Excel Library

Enhanced conversion of Excel to PDF and image formats

The Syncfusion Excel Library (XlsIO) includes the following enhancements for converting Excel files to PDF and image formats:

• 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 conversion.

Performance improvement

The Syncfusion Excel Library performance has 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

The Syncfusion Excel Library now supports adding XML maps to Excel documents. This feature allows users to select and map the fields to the worksheet range.

PDF Library

Enhancements in Arabic script rendering

This feature enables users to render Arabic text with extended characters support for specific blocks, ensuring precise representation and improved readability of Arabic script in PDF documents.

• Extended - A
• Extended - B
• Extended - C
• Presentation Forms - A
• Presentation Forms - B

Circular annotations with cloud border style

This feature allows users to apply a cloud border style to circular annotations in PDF documents, making 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.

PowerPoint Library

PowerPoint-to-PDF and image conversion enhancements

• 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.

Word Library

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 and image conversion enhancements

The Syncfusion Word Library includes the following enhancements when converting Word documents to PDF files or images:

• 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.