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Microsoft news: With support of Windows 7 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, Infragistics’ flagship product provides .NET developers with the flexible, advanced .NET controls needed to rapidly build and style high-fidelity, full-featured line of business applications on every .NET platform – Windows Forms, WPF, ASP.NET and Silverlight.
Jason Beres, director of Product Management at Infragistics had the following to say: “This year, we will deliver three volumes of NetAdvantage for .NET in order to bring to market components that leverage the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 RTM, Our aggressive roadmap proves our commitment to increasing the breadth and depth of every toolset while maintaining the best speed and performance the market has to offer. Our lightning fast grids and advanced functionality within our .NET controls enable .NET developers to concentrate on the business logic of the application and rely on NetAdvantage to create the UI with the best user experience possible.”
With Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 support, Infragistics delivers even more compelling experiences with Windows Forms including in-process side-by-side hosting, multi-touch support for default gestures in Windows 7 and Windows 7 support. With .NET 4 Client Profile support, .NET developers can build NetAdvantage Windows Forms-powered applications using the recommended .NET 4 Client Profile build target in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. With a smaller working set of .NET 4 assemblies, Infragistics has dramatically improved the size, portability and performance of Windows Forms applications.
With .NET Framework 4.0 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 support, Infragistics continues to deliver the most comprehensive WPF component toolset available to address every line of business scenario, including establishing improved support for UI Automation, multi-touch support for default gestures on Windows 7 and improved accessibility support from the platform.
NetAdvantage for .NET 2010 Volume 1 supports Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. Infragistics also offers “committed support” for the later builds, VS2010 Beta 2 and the VS2010 Release Candidate. The company plans to ship NetAdvantage Volume 2 in May, and Volume 3 later this year. It is not clear, which version will include full support for the Visual Studio 2010 RTM, which is expected on April 12.
In Volume 1, Infragistics has updated NetAdvantage for Windows Forms to give developers the tools to update their apps with a modern UI look and feel. This release adds support for the Windows 7 scenic ribbon style toolbar, which is the follow on to the Office 7 fluent ribbon. A rich text framework called WinMessageBoxManager supports customization of dialog boxes. A WinActivityIndicator control gives feedback to end users about long running processes. WinSplitter is designed as a step beyond Microsoft’s System.Windows.Forms.Splitter, giving developers a tool to split up a screen into different segments. WinGanttView is a task-based scheduling control that enables Gantt charts that are similar to the bar charts found in Microsoft Project.
“A lot of the messaging or just general feeling from the developer space is that Microsoft isn’t investing in Windows Forms anymore,” said Jason Beres, director of product management at Infragistics. “Yet, a very, very large percentage -not 100 percent but close – of applications written today are based on Windows Forms and those applications have to be maintained and improved.”
In addition to new controls for WinForms, Infragistics, one of the early supporters of Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), has added two new WPF-based container layout controls. A xamTilesControl supports interactive, collapsible content tiles in a layout panel of rows and columns. The xamDataCards control enables developers to work with data records in a card layout similar to Microsoft Outlook’s contacts feature. UI automation hooks are also available for WPF and Silverlight..
