Infragistics NetAdvantage Suite

asp:review

InfragisticsNetAdvantage Suite

Weband Windows Forms controls accelerate development.

By BrianNoyes

Buildingprofessional-looking user interfaces for Windows applications and Web sites canbe time-consuming and challenging if you work only with the contents of theVisual Studio box. Web Forms and Windows Forms are new arenas in .NETdevelopment. They provide a much improved component-based model for developingreusable controls you can embed in your user interfaces. There are a lot ofcommon interface elements, but you must still write a fair amount of code toimplement them in a reusable manner for multiple applications or interfaces.

Infragistics'NetAdvantage Suite 1.2 addresses the reusability problem. The suite delivers acornucopia of pre-built controls for both .NET and legacy Windows (VisualStudio 6) development that let you create polished, professional interfaces foryour applications quickly. Basically, NetAdvantage is an aggregation of threecomponents from Infragistics: UltraWebSuite, UltraWinSuite, and UltraSuite,each of which contains a collection of controls. I'm going to focus on the .NETWeb controls in the UltraWebSuite because these are what ASP.NET developerswill use most often. But first, let me briefly describe NetAdvantage's otherfeatures.

UltraWinSuitecontains rich Windows Forms controls for creating grids, charts, trees, andscheduling applications. UltraSuite contains a bunch of COM (ActiveX) controlsfor tables, trees, schedules, toolbars, and hierarchical data grids. Thecontrols in either UltraWinSuite or UltraSuite could be viable players for Webapplications, as well. You could use the Windows Forms controls if you wantedto deliver a rich client application over the Web with .NET Xcopy deploymenttechniques. You could embed the ActiveX controls in your Web pages as objectsto provide a rich user-interface experience inside the browser, with the usuallimitations of Web-deployed ActiveX controls. When you see what is availablewith the UltraWebSuite controls, however, you won't want to bother with ActiveXcontrols and WinForms for most applications.

NetAdvantagecomes with many sample applications demonstrating how to use each control andextensive documentation. The .NET controls include a help system that integratesinto the Visual Studio .NET Combined Help Collection (VSCC), as well asindividual topic links in the Start menu for each control. Help in theUltraSuite collection of ActiveX controls is contained in a single WinHelpdocument you can find from the Start Menu. The help for each .NET controlincludes task-based help describing how to use the control as a series ofsteps, as well as a reference section that breaks the control namespace downinto all the classes that compose the control and the methods, properties, andevents for each class to which you have programmatic access. The sampleapplications run as soon as you take them out of the box, but they also providesource code and Visual Studio projects, so it's easy to pick them apart to seehow to code against the controls.

Powerful ASP.NET Server Controls

UltraWebSuiteis organized into four parts, each with its own set of controls: UltraWebBars,which contains the UltraWebTab, UltraWebListbar, and UltraWebToolbarcontrols; UltraWebNavigator, which contains the UltraWebMenu and UltraWebTreecontrols; UltraWebGrid, which contains the UltraWebGrid control; andUltraWebChart, which contains the UltraWebChart control. The controlshave a consistent programming interface. They are all ASP.NET server controls,so they integrate nicely into the Visual Studio .NET forms designer. You candrag and drop them on the designer surface, and you can use the Propertieswindow to configure all their settings at design time in a familiar,component-based approach that requires little or no code. The controls alsoexpose their properties as well as a host of methods and events you can use tocontrol their appearance and behavior at run time. Thanks to the .NET Frameworkarchitecture and the fact that Infragistics did not seal its classes, you canderive your own classes from those in UltraWebSuite to encapsulate specificsettings or behaviors you want to customize or add.

UltraWebNavigatorand its controls let you implement dynamic user-interface controls and behaviorsfor navigation, including horizontal and vertical menus (with flyouts),hierarchical trees, pop-up menus, and outlines. UltraWebNavigator also includesits own little development environment named UltraNavStudio. UltraNavStudioallows you to design menus and trees in an environment that's easy to use. Itlets you select from a wide variety of predefined styles, define and save yourown styles, and preview the run-time behavior of the control in a miniaturebrowser window. Dynamic behaviors, such as hovering and flyouts, are simply amatter of setting a property or two. The same is true for tasks such asassigning colors, image backgrounds, fonts, and styles.

Figure 1a. UltraNavStudio provides adesign-time environment for configuring the UltraWebNavigator controls.

Figure 1b. UltraNavStudio provides adesign-time environment for previewing the UltraWebNavigator controls.

TheUltraWebBars controls let you add toolbars, tabbed pages, and Outlook-stylelist bars to a Web Form quickly. The UltraWebToolbar is a controlcontainer itself, so in addition to adding image and text buttons easily, youcan host your own custom controls, such as a drop-down list, within it. The UltraWebTabcontrol lets you put a tab bar anywhere on your page that contains other controlsor content for display when the tab is selected. At design time in VisualStudio .NET, it is a little ugly because all the controls and content for eachtab appear to be overlaid on one another, even though at run time the contentsare shown one tab at a time. The UltraWebListbar lets you createOutlook-style navigation bars with images for each selection item andcategories to group items. And, like all the other controls, UltraWebListbaris highly customizable, with properties for things such as background images,fonts, and colors.

The UltraWebChartcontrol is a single control, but it's a highly functional and complex one thatallows you to create 2-D and 3-D charts of various types and with levels ofcomplexity and control similar to what you've seen in Microsoft Chart. It hascolumn, bar, area, scatter, line, pie, bubble, and other types of charts, andyou can assign colors, bind to data, and set legends, axes, and data markingseasily. The control also includes built-in mouse-over effects for reading offvalues from many of the chart types. For Web-based data presentation, thiscontrol's ease of integration and level of functionality are tough to beat.

Figure 2. Use the UltraWebChart control tovisualize your data from the Web. A plethora of chart types and customizationsmakes integrating this control a snap.

The UltraWebGridcontrol builds on the functionality of the .NET Framework's DataGridcontrol. UltraWebGrid simply speeds the process of creating various gridtypes by minimizing the amount of code you need to write to implement commonfeatures such as data binding, hierarchical data display, end-user gridcustomization, and view state. You can get a fully functional grid of dynamicor static data integrated and looking good in your Web Forms much quicker withthis control than you could if you tried to code it yourself.

Figure 3. The UltraWebGrid extends thecapabilities of the .NET DataGrid, saving you considerable amounts ofcustomization and coding to achieve commonly desired appearances and behaviors.

All It Claims to Be

Surprisingly,the controls are not integrated into the toolbox after installation, so you'llhave to go through and add them yourself using the Customize Toolbox dialog tomake them readily accessible at design time. It would have been nice if asimple add-in could have added the controls in a tab group within the toolboxfor you. But other than that minor complaint, the control suite delivers a lotof functionality for the price. I found NetAdvantage easy to install and use,and I feel it lives up to everything it is marketed to be. The large number ofrelevant samples, the ease of use in the designer, and the extensivecustomization available with each control will make you wonder why you wouldever bother coding the same features yourself from the base .NET Frameworkcontrols. When you consider that server controls like these, which provide arich designer experience for integration, provide no designer support atdevelopment time in Visual Studio, the reasons to use NetAdvantage are evenmore convincing.

Becausethese are server controls, you don't have to worry about deployment licensing,but you will need a license for each developer. The nice thing for those of uswho develop on multiple machines is you only need one license. As long as youare the only one developing with the controls, you can install them on multiplemachines as long as you don't pass them off to another developer.

BrianNoyes is anindependent software consultant and president of Software Insight (http://www.softinsight.com). He's aMicrosoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD) with more than 11 years ofprogramming, designing, and engineering experience. Brian specializes inarchitecture, design, and coding of cutting-edge software systems, and hecontributes to numerous trade publications. E-mail him at mailto:[email protected].

asp:factfile

Infragistics'NetAdvantage Suite is a control library that includes .NET Web Form controls,Windows Form controls, and ActiveX controls that speed development of rich userinterfaces for your Web-based and Windows-based applications. The suitefeatures:

Infragistics

Windsor Corporate Park

50Millstone Road

Building200, Suite 150

EastWindsor, N.J. 08520

Phone:(800) 231-8588; (609) 448-2000

E-mail:mailto:[email protected]

Web Site:http://www.infragistics.com

Price:Starts at US$495

Rating: