For accessibility-related reasons, certain business usage scenarios require that Office documents include meaningful descriptions/alternative text (Alt Text) for graphics content (images, charts, etc). Alt Text helps individuals with visual impairments to interpret pictures and other graphical content (screen readers cannot properly read documents that contain images without Alt Text). In addition, documents without Alt Text cannot be exported correctly as accessible PDFs (these PDFs fail accessibility validation). The OpenAI platform offers a solution to address this particular requireme ..read more

New Deployment Guides for Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) We've just released new guides for deploying DevExpress Reports and Office File API-based applications to Microsoft Azure and/or Amazon Web Services (AWS). As you know, deployment on Azure and AWS offers numerous benefits. You can scale your applications, improve performance, and increase availability. Our tutorials will show you how to create DevExpress Reports and Office File API-powered apps using Docker containers, and Web API-based applications built with Azure and AWS Lambda Functions. Microsoft Azure Tutorials Repor ..read more

“Write once, run anywhere" – this slogan helped Java achieve widespread popularity in the mid-1990s. Since then, many cross-platform frameworks have been introduced, such as Ionic, Flutter, and of course .NET MAUI. These frameworks allow developers to use the same code regardless of the underlying operating system/device type. While using a single UI framework may save time/resources, the effectiveness and efficiency of this development strategy depends entirely on app complexity and UX requirements. An alternative technique to a cross-platform app is to share bus ..read more

In this post, I'll outline important Do's and Don'ts when using the DevExpress WinForms HTML/CSS engine/templates. If you are new to DevExpress/considering our WinForms UI Library for an upcoming project and have yet to explore the potential of our WinForms HTML/CSS feature, please take a moment to review the following online content first: HTML & CSS Markup for WinForms UI | DevExpress Do's when Using HTML/CSS  The following WinForms usage scenarios require basic HTML/CSS knowledge. Customize UI Elements of HTML-CSS-aware Controls (Simple) Use HTML/CSS T ..read more

Kudos and a big thanks to Embarcadero for their quick turnaround on the RSS-536 incompatibility issue for the Delphi 64-bit compiler (please apply this patch if you installed RAD Studio 12.1 previously). From RAD Studio 12.1 Athens Patch 1 Available: Embarcadero released a patch for RAD Studio, Delphi, and C++Builder 12.1 Athens. This patch addresses some issues in RAD Studio 12.1, around the new editor split view feature of the IDE, the Delphi 64-bit compiler when building packages, debugging, and strings. This patch is about 517MB to download. As some ..read more

Accessibility support remains a high priority here at DevExpress. In our v.23.2 release lifecycle, we focused on accessibility at the control level and to producing more accessible content (PDF documents generated by DevExpress Reports). We enhanced accessible tags in exported PDF documents (compatible with the PDF/UA and PDF/A-1a, 2a or 3a specification), so screen readers can recognize the semantic tree of the document. With XRAccessibleRole you can now define UI element roles in the exported PDF document. These roles are used by assistive technologies. Sup ..read more

In the late 80s, physicist Tim Berners-Lee created the first prototype of HTML - a unified format designed to share documents between researchers. Since then, HTML adoption has grown exponentially, and is now used in browsers, email clients, and CMS systems. Needless to say, rich content stored in HTML format is used across the web and within applications able to render HTML. Thanks to its versatility, HTML is now ubiquitous.  If HTML editing is important to your mobile development strategy, the DevExpress .NET MAUI HTML Edit Control can help you incorpo ..read more

As you may already know, we are a couple of months away from our next major update (v24.1). This post describes a few XAF-related features we expect to ship in early June and details what’s inside our Early Access Preview build (for additional information on what you can expect, refer to our June 2024.1 roadmap). As you will see below, XAF key focus areas will continue to remain Blazor, Entity Framework Core, Security and .NET 8. One of XAF’s core development pillars is Low-Code/No-Code .NET application development (for Web, Desktop and APIs simultaneous ..read more

Why Node.js and WebAssembly? Customizing DevExpress Reports (within a back-end application) may present unique challenges to front end-web developers new to .NET. In this post, we'll show you how the integration of .NET and WebAssembly can help address these challenges and enhance overall app security/performance. The conventional approach to report development/customization requires expertise in .NET and related languages...but WebAssembly eliminates this requirement. By running .NET applications in a WASM environment, developers can integrate interactive reports into Node.js application ..read more

In this post, I'll describe TypeScript-related enhancements introduced in our last two major updates (v23.1 and v23.2). Should you have questions about these new capabilities, please submit a ticket via the DevExpress Support Center. We'll be happy to follow-up. All Frameworks You can now import all required types directly from framework-specific packages. You no longer need to import types from a separate `devextreme` package. Before import { ColumnChooserMode } from 'devextreme/common/grids'; import DataGrid from 'devextreme-react/data-grid'; After import DataGrid, { DataGr ..read more