WinForms RadGridView's new clothes

In our latest release – Q1 2009 – we were focused mostly on addressing known issues and minimizing the memory footprint of RadGridView for WinForms.  However, we managed also to steal some time and redesign all of RadGridView’s themes. Some optimizations in our TPF framework helped us with this task.

One of the heaviest operations in GDI+ is clipping. We managed to remove the clipping where it wasn’t really needed. This way we achieved two goals with a single shot: first, we got a performance boost, and second, we achieved better graphics and smoothed edges when using shapes. Our new Desert theme shows these improvements very well:

Many people requested that we add a style to distinguish between the current cell and all other cells. Now, all themes contain such a style.  For example, the default Vista theme uses a light solid brush to paint the current cell:

Another small improvement is the new consistent look of grid dialogs and context menus, which are now synchronized with the theme used by RadGridView. This is Q1’s new Breeze theme with a context menu and the Conditional Formatting dialog (which also has improved UI):

You could also use the color blending feature of our theme system to create new themes with a few lines of code. The following code will modify the Office2007Blue theme to use the red palette instead of the blue:

Theme theme = ThemeResolutionService.GetTheme("Breeze"); 
if (theme != null) 
{ 
    theme.RemoveAllColorBlends(false); 
    theme.AddColorBlend("Color1", HslColor.FromArgb(255, 32, 143, 254), false); 
    theme.ThemeProperties["Color1"] = Color.Red; 
    theme.NotifyThemeChanged(); 
} 
ThemeResolutionService.ApplyThemeToControlTree(this.radGridView1, "Breeze"); 

And the result is:

I hope you will enjoy playing with Q1 2009 and the new improved themes.