Sewing, Spain's General Strike and Plugin Progress

There is a sewing option (in the same menu with pipe). Sewing will build one shape from incident faces. Anyway, the faces individually do not make a bigger face, to say as such, so it does not solve if you want to extrude more faces at once, but if you want to scale more faces uniformly, sewing may be a solution (this happen in the way that OpenCascade handles sewing).
A big interruption for me in those days was Spain's General Strike. Amazingly, things work randomly, but the hardest part was transportation issues, some violence here and there (I donot participate to those acts, but I'm still wondering). This strike was mostly bombarding media in all directions and at least regarding Madrid, the vandalism I found was really pointless.
I was working reviewing how I can handle the UI to be extensible. The single problem is that the solution I thought may duplicate most of the UI code and will render Xaml coding useless (as all Xaml code can be rewritten in C#) so I'm not sure if this is really the solution. Even it will be in this way, I will most likely have to make it hierarchically (like a folder path, where people adds things under: Ribbon/Shapes/Tools/Sewing) and per path node should be defined a factory creator. Anyway I will think more about it, and if I will be blocked I will likely get to look to other area for now.

Options Fixed, Layer minimization

Options Dialog was fixed by hardcoding the layout with other values. Information on layers was minimized to be more compact (not in two rows but just in one)..

Options Dialog change

Options Dialog have right now Windows style of Options (means OK, Cancel & Apply). There are some layout problems and this is the reason that there is no screenshot attached.

AvalonDock Up-To-Date

For drag&dropping and setting dock-able panels we use AvalonDock and the code was made in sync the last version of AvalonDock. For now the themes are not compatible so they need to be updated to look again shiny but this will be fixed soon. 

I was reviewing the docking code too and soon the external component code will be able to add dockable content without creating by itself the dockable components, but just the control that wants to be docked.

A good to have feature is to save the docking configuration but so far I've did not found (I've did not look that deeply though) a solution.

Improved Options Notification

NaroCAD uses the setting setup similar with Mac OS X/GNOME applications, meaning that the settings apply automatically. To make this happen, we use a mechanism that options are written in a NaroCAD document, and when a setup option will change, a notification is sent and all listeners.
This design is fairly inefficient as if for example you change a setting that will adjust the solver sensibility, as side effects, the all options reapply, like but not limited to: update tree view, resetup the color of background shapes, and so on.
Right now to be sure that the old code is not changed, the global notification still exist, but I've made that at least for solver, tree view and OpenCascade parts, they will not listen to global notification, but to the "solver section" ones which corresponds specifically when you change punctually the corresponding pages.
The main benefit will be that options in general will be far more responsive and you will see the applying of options regardless of the size of the future options dialog that they will not get slower and slower.
A small change is that right now there is an Zoom speed option to adjust nicely to your flows. More advanced options may follow later, but if you wanted to do precise drawing, you were out of luck in your previous work.

Layers, Layers, Layers

Layer work is mostly done (it may needs some testing and fixes of problems found). Right now have another view that you can setup your layers and for every shape you have the option to pick the layer by name. In the LayerView you will be able to manage layers, to override the scene colors if you want to pick by layer profile.

Some nice tricks are in this dialog like: every time you pick Add Layer, a random color is generated, another part is that Remove button will be disabled for current layer, and so on.

So you may try this functionality via nightly build.

P.S. The color theme is on my machine, so don't feel attacked for it :)

NaroCAD website

We remind you of our website www.narocad.com. There you can find a forum where you can post messages about all the problems, suggestions, ideas or whatever you have in mind about NaroCAD.There you can find also tutorials, documentation, screenshots and others.