This is our summer 2026 release. Six products move. Xceed Words for .NET 6.0 is the one to look at first, and Xceed SFTP for .NET 7.4 brings post-quantum security worth a close look.

Updates also ship for Xceed PDF Library for .NET, Toolkit Plus for WPF, DataGrid pour WPFet Xceed Zip for COM/ActiveX and x64. Here are the highlights.

Xceed Words for .NET 6.0

We jumped Words a full version, from 5.2 straight to 6.0, and that was a deliberate call. The change at the center of this release is big enough on its own to earn the number. Most of this section is about Words for that reason.

Export Word documents to HTML

You can now turn a Word document into clean, standards-compliant HTML with a single call. There is a new ConvertToHtml method on DocX. Point it at a Word document and it writes the result to a file or a stream. That is the whole API surface for the common case.

You decide how CSS arrives: an internal stylesheet in the head, inline styles on each element, or an external stylesheet you ship alongside the page. Images can ship as Base64 data URIs embedded in the markup, as external files, or be omitted entirely. Fonts follow the same pattern, referenced by name only, embedded as Base64, or written out as external font files. There are eight doctype standards to target, from HTML5 down through XHTML 1.1, so the output fits whatever pipeline or CMS is consuming it. If accessibility matters, and it usually should, there are modes that emit semantic HTML5 with optional ARIA roles and preserved image alt text.

The converter keeps more than most homegrown exporters manage: multi-level lists, embedded fonts, picture bullets, headers and footers, footnotes, tracked changes, and tables. Output can be made deterministic and byte-stable across runs, so generated files diff cleanly and are safe to commit. And if you are white-labeling the result for a client, you can re-prefix every class and id name so the markup carries your own naming.

If you have ever started a custom Word-to-HTML conversion project, you know how it goes. It works for the first three documents, then someone hands you a file with nested tables and footnotes, and you own that exporter forever. ConvertToHtml replaces that whole project with one method call.

Flexible document splitting

A new Split overload takes a SplitOptions object and breaks one document into many .docx files along any of six structural markers: headings, section breaks, bookmarks, content controls, page breaks, or column breaks. Each marker has its own options type, so each one exposes only the options that make sense for it. BookmarkSplitOptions can match bookmarks by regular expression. HeadingSplitOptions lets you split at specific heading levels. PageBreakSplitOptions can cut at every Nth page break with a cap on how many files come out. You can also filter sections by break type or content controls by type.

If you already split by heading or section the old way, nothing changes. That path still works exactly as before, so the new overload is purely additive.

Bigger, more controllable charts

The chart work this round is all pure OOXML. No Office install, no interop, nothing to license on the server.

Data labels are now properly programmable, with number formatting, leader lines, per-point overrides, and the ability to show or hide a single label rather than the whole set. Axis gridlines can be styled with their own color, width, and dash style for both major and minor lines. Colors are set per slice or per point on DataPoint.Color, instead of a separate color list you have to keep in sync manually. You can build combo charts that put stacked columns, clustered columns, and a line on one shared set of axes. Line series can be drawn straight by setting Smooth to false, and a value axis can go logarithmic through ValueAxis.LogBase.

Under all of that is a canonical-ordering engine that writes every element into its correct schema slot. The practical payoff is that generated files no longer trip Word’s repair prompt when you open them. That has been a long-standing annoyance when producing complex charts programmatically.

The rest of the Words 6.0 work

A handful of smaller additions round it out. List presets give you up to 20 ready-made list styles through ListOptions and AddList, so you can stop hardcoding every indent level by hand. Text columns bring real multi-column page layouts with presets like TextColumnPreset.Three, which wasn’t possible before. AddImage from a stream now auto-detects png, jpeg, and gif, so you no longer have to pass the format yourself, though the explicit overload is still there if you want to skip the detection step.

InsertParagraphAfterSelf and InsertParagraphBeforeSelf now accept paragraphs that originate in a different document and carry their hyperlinks, images, charts, and comments across without throwing. It fits the case where you are lifting one section out of a file instead of merging the whole document. Pair it with the new InsertTableOfContentsMarker, which writes hidden TC field markers, and you can merge several documents so each one lands as its own top-level TOC entry with its internal headings indented beneath it, leaving the source files untouched.

Finally, six fixes land on the PDF conversion path, covering tab alignment, vertically merged table cells that split across pages, missing table content, and an out-of-memory crash that image-heavy headers used to cause.

Xceed SFTP for .NET 7.4

SFTP pour .NET moves to 7.4 with one forward-looking addition: a key exchange algorithm built to resist “store now, decrypt later” attacks from future quantum computers.

Post-quantum key exchange

The post-quantum key exchange mlkem768x25519-sha256 is now available when connecting to an SSH server. It is enabled by default and selected automatically through negotiation with the server, so no action or application code change is needed to benefit from it. The algorithm is a hybrid method that combines the quantum-resistant Module-Lattice-based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM) with the traditional Curve25519 Elliptic-curve Diffie–Hellman scheme and SHA2-256.

Key exchange is the step where the client and server agree on a shared secret key at the start of a connection, without ever sending that key over the internet. The shared secret then encrypts and authenticates everything that follows. Its security rests on certain instances of the discrete logarithm problem being computationally infeasible to solve. Sufficiently large quantum computers would solve those instances, which would make the key exchange and authentication methods in today’s SSH insecure. Large quantum computers do not exist yet, but an adversary could record an encrypted SSH session now and decrypt it once the hardware arrives. That is the “store now, decrypt later” attack, and many observers expect machines capable of it to arrive in the mid-2030s.

These algorithms have had years of scrutiny from cryptographic experts, and that review led to the method being standardized for SSH by the Internet Engineering Task Force. New attacks could still surface, which is exactly why mlkem768x25519-sha256 is hybrid. Combining the two independent algorithms keeps the result at least as strong as the better of the two, so it is no worse than the previous best traditional method even if the post-quantum part is later broken by cryptanalysis.

Xceed Zip for COM/ActiveX and Xceed Zip for x64 6.6

Zip for COM/ActiveX et Zip for x64 both move to 6.6, and the headline is long file and path names.

File names and paths can now run up to 32,700 characters, up from 260. Zipping a deep directory hierarchy, or a file with a very long name, is no longer a problem: the new limit matches Windows’ own. See the FilesToProcess documentation page for how to specify long paths properly.

This one is tied to the 6.6 license. A license key from an earlier version still works, since 6.6 is backwards compatible with 6.5 and earlier, but the limit stays at 260 characters until you move to a 6.6 license. If you are running an older Xceed Zip license, this is a good reason to update.

Xceed PDF Library for .NET 3.0

PDF Library moves from 2.0 to 3.0, and the theme is editing the PDFs you already have rather than only generating new ones.

The biggest piece is real text editing in an existing document. Build a TextSearchOptions, optionally scoped by area, font, size, bold or italic state, or brush, then call page.FindText to collect the matches. From there, page.RemoveText, page.ReplaceText, and page.UpdateTextStyle act on those results. That covers filling placeholders in a template, correcting a typo in a finished file, or emphasizing a clause that needs to stand out, all without regenerating the whole PDF.

The same after-the-fact editing now extends to graphics. You can change the Bounds, opacity, pen, or brush of an ImageObject or PathObject that was already in the loaded document, so rescaling or recoloring an element no longer means rebuilding the page around it.

JPG images are now supported, where it was PNG only before, and opacity is available on both ImageObject and Brush. Transparency in a loaded PDF is now preserved on save, so round-tripping a file no longer flattens what was already there.

Encryption is now handled through EncryptionOptions. You can set a UserPassword and an OwnerPassword, choose from five encryption profiles (Aes128, Aes256_R5, Aes256_R6, Rc4_40, and Rc4_128), and grant granular Permissions such as Print or CopyContent. Attach the options through SaveOptions when you save, and load password-protected PDFs the same way.

A Watermark can now hold any number of texts and images, and each one carries its own opacity, rotation angle, and position. Before this, a watermark was a single forced block of text, which made anything past a plain diagonal stamp awkward to produce.

Xceed Toolkit Plus for WPF 5.2

Toolkit Plus moves to 5.2 with two new pieces and a pair of AvalonDock fixes.

The first new addition is a ChatControl, a XAML-definable chat UI for showing a conversation between a user and an assistant. You get customizable bubbles, corner radius, timestamps, a typing indicator, and an input area, which is enough to stand up an in-app support thread or an assistant experience without inventing the layout from scratch.

The second is a WrapPanel view for ListBox. Until now ListBox could only stack its items in a single row or a single column. The new vertical or horizontal WrapPanel view flows items across lines or columns based on the container size.

On the AvalonDock side, routed commands now fire correctly when a LayoutAutoHideWindowControl contains a LayoutAnchorable, and the docking manager now resizes its children properly when its window is resized.

Xceed DataGrid for WPF 7.3

Grille de données stays at 7.3 on purpose. This is a focused stability fix, not a feature bump, and it is worth a short note because of who it affects.

Groups and the rows beneath them no longer disappear under UI Automation. The old behavior could break automated UI tests outright and could misreport the grid’s state to assistive technology, so this keeps the grid in sync with its real content for both your test suite and screen reader users. If you run automated UI tests against a grouped grid, or you ship to customers who depend on a screen reader, this one is worth the update on its own.

Suite updates

Both Xceed Business Suite et Xceed Ultimate Suite now include Words for .NET 6.0 and PDF Library for .NET 3.0. If you license through either suite, the HTML export, the PDF editing API, and everything else above are already part of your package the next time you pull the suite packages. Nothing extra to buy.

Get the update

Ready to update? Existing customers can pull the new versions straight from NuGet, and the suite installers carry the latest of everything.

If you are evaluating, start your free trial and try the Words 6.0 HTML export on one of your own documents. You can also browse the full set of packages on NuGet to drop the updates into an existing solution.

A real thank-you to the team behind this one. Words 6.0 took most of two release cycles to get right. Enjoy your summer!