Xceed Spring Update! 2021
What we are working on
We have been really busy at Xceed working on improvements to most of our products from Xceed DataGrid for WPF, Toolkit, Zip, sFTP, Words for .NET. As an example, Xceed is currently working on supporting Digital Signatures in Words for .NET. This will allow our users to programmatically sign documents through code. A unique feature that should/could allow you to accelerate some of your workflows. If you regularly use tools like "DocuSign", we feel that Xceed Words for .NET will be a great alternative. We’re also working on many other improvements for Xceed Words for .NET and if you have questions or suggestions, you can contact us at support@xceed.com or reach to our technical director directly at matt@xceed.com. Speaking of which, Matt has been working on videos that will show case our existing products and provide quick guided tours of them. You can view them right now on our website.
Another notable product we've been working hard on is our new Xceed DataGrid for JavaScript. At the time of writing, the team has added stat functions in groups. In other words, when you group elements in the datagrid, you will be able to add stat functions such as counts, averages etc. Furthermore, we’re also working on improving the performance of the product. Although already fast, performance will always remain a priority. As per our experience with Xceed DataGrid for WPF, it is something we will work on for the entire products life-cycle.
What's next for us
One of our top priorities right now is making sure our products all support Microsoft’s latest technology. This means updating all our products to .NET 5. Most of our products already supported either .NET Standard 2.0 and/or .NET Core 3.1 therefore updating it to .NET 5 is the next logical step. Xceed is working closely with Microsoft to make sure the transition is as smooth for us as it will be for you.
Xceed SFTP (FTP over SSH) for .NET will add support for "AES Galois/Counter Mode" (AES-GCM) authenticated encryption in 128 and 256 bit key sizes. AES-GCM is a popular and widely adopted encryption algorithm. More and more SSH servers now require AES-GCM support so it is a good time to upgrade your Xceed SFTP component to avoid suddenly losing the ability to connect to updated servers. Xceed's AES-GCM implementation is independent of the .NET Framework and will work on any platform, old and new versions of the framework. Your application will not need to target a new framework to use AES-GCM. The encryption will be used automatically as required by the server or usage can be manually forced by your application.
To make updating easier, all .NET components based on Xceed FileSystem (Zip, Real-Time Zip, FTP, SFTP) now have assembly names that do not contain their version number. This reduces the number of steps needed to update your applications that use Xceed components as your assembly references no longer need to be modified each time.
This is just some of the items we are working on at Xceed, we expect to have more details for a summer release soon so keep an eye out! Once again, if you have comments, questions, or suggestions, please reach out!