Winter Update: Xceed Workbooks for .NET Launch, Material Design for WPF, and Upcoming Encryption Library

This Winter, Xceed introduces Xceed Workbooks for .NET, allowing users to create and manipulate Excel documents. The Xceed Toolkit Plus for WPF also received a major update with support for Material Design, and the DataGrid for WPF will follow soon. Xceed is exploring new additions to its Office and security libraries, including an Encryption library. All products now support .NET 5.0, .NET 6.0, and Visual Studio 2022, ensuring continued compatibility.

This Winter brings a new product to our roster, quite a few updates to our product suites and some exciting news to keep you going until Spring.

If you want to learn about all those exciting news we have for you, you may want to watch the Winter Update video where everything is covered. If you prefer reading about it, well, keep reading…

First, we’re very thrilled to bring you the first commercial version of Xceed Workbooks for .NET. This product is similar to Xceed Words for .NET, but allows you to create, modify and manipulate Excel documents. Even though this is the first commercially available version of this product, it is still full of features and should allow you to do most of what you would want it to do. If you’re like us and always want to do more, however, don’t worry: other features will be added soon as we continue to update the product regularly. In the meantime, start exploring all it has to offer. It is incredibly easy to use and offers copy and paste friendly samples for all of its functionalities.

Let’s talk about WPF for a moment. Did you notice the considerable update we did to the Xceed Toolkit Plus? We basically revamped its entire look so that it could properly support the popular Material Design style. If you use XAML Material design for your projects, then our products will fit right in! And fear not, we are also currently working on updating our DataGrid for WPF to support this awesome visual style, and the style will be available for all the controls inside the DataGrid very soon. Keep in mind that we will also offer the full source code of our sample explorer, which is a good “shell” starting point for your own application. Who said we weren’t generous?

Now, let’s talk about what’s coming in the Xceed pipeline. Xceed Workbooks for .NET is a great addition to our Document Libraries Suite (this is the surname we gave to our Office-related products here at the Xceed office). In fact, we love this addition so much, that we are currently considering adding more libraries to our “Office bundle”. We’re not settled on what the next addition will be though and are looking at many different options, so if you have any suggestions or would like to share your needs for similar products, feel free to drop me an email at matt@xceed.com.

We’re also currently considering expanding our offer in terms of security libraries. If you are used to working with Xceed sFTP for .NET, then you already know that Xceed has great expertise in this field. Using this expertise, we are currently building the foundations for an Encryption library that will allow you to encrypt both files and memory. This development is still in its early stages, but due to all the experience we have gained developing Xceed sFTP for .NET, and to the fact that our developers are pretty much obsessed with their work, I expect this new product to be available sometime this year. If you wish to learn more or be kept in the loop regarding the development for that product, just let us know! (the email is still matt@xceed.com; it hasn’t changed since the last paragraph!)

I did mention this in previous posts but I want to make something clear right now:  As developers, we know this is a very important matter and you can rest assured that our products will always keep up with all the latest developments in the .NET technologies. This means that all our products (.NET and WPF) now support .NET 5.0 and .NET 6.0. Some of our products have been around since .NET 1.0 and we intend to keep improving them and updating them for as long as Microsoft supports this framework. The same goes for Visual Studio: our products fully support Visual Studio 2022 and will continue to support previous versions for as long as necessary. 

Well, that’s all folks! Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy using our tools as much as we enjoy building them for you. And that’s quite a lot!