Actipro WPF Studio - Updated with Improved Design Time Support

On 1/29/2008, Actipro released a new build of their WPF Studio.  You'll recall that I blogged about their use of extensibility to improve the design time interaction of their controls.  This new release ups the ante with drag and drop layout, a really cool image picker and a host of other improvements across their task panes.

Check out: https://www.actiprosoftware.com/Products/DotNet/WPF/Ribbon/DesignerSupport.aspx

Here's a shot of the image picker:

For a hint on how they did this, here is a tip from resident Cider Architect Brian Pepin:

There is a service called ExternalResourceService that is defined in Microsoft.Windows.Design.Markup. It allows you to enumerate the images (and other resources) in the project. When you find an image you want, it is returned as a type called BinaryResource. BinaryResource can be used to obtain a stream and it can also be used to obtain a special kind of URI called a "stream" URI. If you pass this URI to a WPF API that uses URIs, or if you pass it to WebRequest.Create, you can get back a stream as well. 

This is how we handle all resources in the designer and it allows you to ignore the details of the URI.

I also updated the screen shots on the previous post referenced above.