Xceed Fall Update

 Summer being already behind us, it’s time to update you, our users and potential users, about what has been going on at Xceed. In short, most of our products have received significant updates in the last few months and we recently introduced a brand new product in our ever-evolving line of components.

Xceed Words for .NET is one of our most popular product here at Xceed and it seemed like a natural choice to introduce a product following in its footsteps. The result: Xceed Workbooks for .NET, which uses the same idea behind Words for .NET but applies it to Microsoft Excel documents. This means that it allows you to create, modify and manipulate Microsoft Excel documents programmatically. It is currently available in beta only and you can give it a go by downloading our Xceed Words for .NET package.

At Xceed, we will always do our best to support all the new technologies that our customers use. That is why we made sure that all our .NET and WPF products are compatible with the new Windows 11 environment that appeared this last October. The same philosophy applies for .NET 5. Xceed supports it and we guarantee that our products will support .NET 6 properly as well when it is released.

Xceed Toolkit for WPF is also receiving a major overhaul. The product has been on the market for many years now, so it is time for us to refresh it with a brand new look. To do so, we added the Material Design theme to it. Material Design Xaml is one of the most popular themes on nugget and, therefore, we decided to make sure that all of the controls in Xceed Toolkit have the same look and feel. This way, you can seamlessly integrate our product in all of your applications using Material Design Xaml. Not a designer? No problem! We are also working on a white paper that you will be able to use to make sure that you get the most beautiful app using Xceed Toolkit for WPF (coming soon).

Xceed DataGrid for WPF will receive a similar treatment and we will update its look to support more modern applications. To help you, we will also offer examples that you will be able to follow and implement in your own applications. We have other new features planned for the product but nothing we can talk about right now. We like being mysterious… If you have suggestions or features you would like to see in the future, drop me an email at matt@xceed.com and I will share your suggestion with our team.

As for our Zip/FTP components, we are working on leveraging the extensive library of encryption and data integrity algorithms used in our Xceed SFtp for .NET component to bring to the market an implementation of version 1.3 of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) cryptographic protocol to our Xceed FTP for .NET component. Why? The TLS 1.3 specification is used more and more on FTP servers due to its increased security, faster performance, and reduced complexity.

Unfortunately, TLS 1.3 is only supported by very recent updates of Windows 10 and .NET support depends on the version of the framework (.NET 5 only) and the underlying operating system used. This makes supporting TLS 1.3 in a .NET application across a wide range of current and legacy client installations almost impossible.

Xceed wants to address this issue by offering a platform-independent implementation of TLS 1.3, one that will work on any version of Windows, Linux or MacOS and any version of the .NET framework from .NET 4, .NET Standard, .NET Core to .NET 5.

There you have it! A glimpse into what has been done, what we’re working on and what is coming up at Xceed. If you have any questions or interrogation, drop me an email at matt@xceed.com. Have a good Fall and keep an eye out for our Winter update!