Ultimate UI Controls for Xamarin: What's New in 17.1

We’re excited to announce the 17.1 release of Ultimate UI Controls for Xamarin. Our goal with this release is to continue with our Write Fast, Run Fast promise, while making it easier for you to create cross-platform mobile apps.

We’re pleased to announce two new controls  you can use in your app development: a Scheduler to display and track calendar items; and Sparkline Charts to give you a compact, quick-glance way to visualize data.

Schedule

The Schedule control gives you a way to display and manage appointments and resources. The built-in views for a schedule include month views, month with agenda, or an agenda view.

You can create the schedule data by using the built-in appointment and resource classes; or you can create your own custom business objects. This new control is based on MVVM standards and has full support for data binding to appointments and resources.

Appointments

Appointments are a core concept when you are using or writing a scheduling application. The appointment object contains all of the necessary information about an activity that will occur at a specific time.

You can then use the Schedule control to collect and display the appointment details (start date and time, end date and time, subject, and more) using one of the supported views. You can even setup recurring appointments for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly recurrences.

Resources

You can also schedule resources, such as a conference room where you plan to hold a meeting or the person responsible for a presentation. Each resource can be assigned a unique color scheme to more easily identify the resource associated with an appointment. Choose from 11 built-in color schemes including Grape, Strawberry, Sky, and Leafy, to name just a few.

Views

You can view the schedule data by using either a month or agenda view. The month view displays all of the weeks of the month from top to bottom. The month view has a split agenda view so that you can view appointment specifics for a selected date. If you only need to see the days that might be free, you can remove the agenda pane.

The Agenda view shows the full list of all of the appointments that have been scheduled. This lets you focus only on the appointment that is coming up next, regardless of the actual date.

Data Binding

The Schedule control was built for Xamarin.Forms application using the MVVM design pattern. The Schedule control has a built-in ScheduleLIstDataSource class, which holds details about the appointments and resources to be rendered in the schedule. You can also use your own collection of custom POCO classes and map your object’s properties to the properties that the Schedule control expects. All from within XAML!

Sparkline Charts

The Sparkline control is a data-intense, design-simple graphic that allows end users to spot trends, variations, and data patterns in a clear and compact representation. It is intended for rendering in a small-scale layout such as a grid cell, but can also be rendered as a standalone control. There are a few different sparkline chart types that you can use:

• Area: This is similar to a line chart, with closing the area after each line is drawn with numeric data
• Column: This displays vertical bars using numeric data
• Line: This connect numeric data points together with line segments
• WinLoss: This indicates a win or loss scenario, showing the positive maximum or negative minimum values of a data set

Trend Lines

Trend lines are lines drawn from the starting point to the end point of the chart data, indicating the trending direction and movement of the series, so that the viewer can evaluate the tendencies in the data and mentally extrapolate past, future, or unknown values. The Trend Line feature enables you to choose among several formulas for generating a trending directional line, including linear, weighted, quadratic, cubic, quartic, quintic, logarithmic, exponential, and more.

Markers

Markers are symbols overlaid on a single data point to indicate the individual data points plotted on the chart, based on the X/Y coordinates. The Sparkline can display markers such as First/Last, High/Low, Negative, or all markers.

Interpolating Unknown Values

The Sparkline can detect unknown values and render the space for the unknown values using a specified interpolation algorithm.

Productivity Pack

The Productivity Pack includes three components that help you Write Fast and Run Fast:

• AppMap: Drag and drop pages and navigation links to whiteboard a mobile app design
• Infragistics Toolbox: Drag and drop controls to help you write faster
• Control Configurators: Visually configure how your controls look and operate and let us create the XAML for you

AppMap

The exclusive Infragistics Xamarin Productivity Pack will change the way you write Xamarin.Forms applications. You start by whiteboarding out your app with the App Map, the first visual diagramming IDE for Xamarin.

AppMap allows you to visually layout a UI in a WYSIWYG format while generating the necessary XAML code, Views, and ViewModels. All of the components created by AppMap follow best practices using PRISM. By linking the pages together with the navigation arrows, even the hamburger navigation menu gets created for you. Try it out today using our how-to guide and sample app!

Infragistics Toolbox

Next, add controls, using the world's first NuGet-powered Xamarin.Forms Toolbox.

Just drag and drop controls to the XAML editor, or hold down the Ctrl key while dragging to get extended XAML snippets, making your code writing much easier and reducing the amount of hand-coding you have to do. Check out our how-to guide for a sample app and a walkthrough of using the Toolbox.

Control Configurators

Finally, use the Control Configurators to visually configure rich controls like charts, gauges, and the data grid right in the XAML editor, shaving hours off development time. Our how-to guide walks you through creating a grid with sample data, and then formatting and customizing the grid without writing a single line of XAML.

The 17.1 release of Ultimate UI for Xamarin gives you more capabilities with the new capabilities introduced for the UI Controls for Xamarin. Download a trial today to get started, and then check out the Write Fast and Run Fast lessons that will have you creating cross-platform Xamarin.Forms mobile apps in no time.