NetAdvantage 2003 Vol. 2

asp:review

NetAdvantage 2003 Vol. 2

By Brian Noyes

Creating components that add immediate and significantvalue to what the .NET Framework provides is a challenging proposition.Infragistics continues to rise to this challenge with each release of its componentsuites, and NetAdvantage 2003 Vol. 2 is no different. NetAdvantage is acollection of user-interface controls for both Web Forms and Windows Formsdevelopment that lets you build rich user interfaces quickly. It containscontrols for navigation, grids, trees, and charting, as well as other purposesthat build on what the .NET Framework gives you and let you focus on thebusiness problem you are trying to solve.

This newest release of NetAdvantage adds many powerfulenhancements to its UltraWebBars control suite. The UltraWebBars collection iscomposed of three main controls: UltraWebToolbar, UltraWebTab, andUltraWebListBar. Each control takes a different approach to providing selectionand navigation controls for your Web pages that can give you rich userinterfaces quickly and easily within a browser window (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The UltraWebBars controls let you add highly customizabletoolbars, tabbed interfaces, and Outlook-style list bars to your Web pages togive the user a much richer navigation experience than traditional Web controlsallow.

The first thing that impressed me with all of theInfragistics components is that you can easily start using them to add simpleand basic functionality to your site right away. The suite includes greatdocumentation and many good samples to show the controls in action. It even hasan extensive online sample application at http://www.infragistics.com/expensethat resembles an ASP.NET Starter Kit for Infragistics controls (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. The Infragistics Expense online reporting sample applicationgives you a complex example of a real-world application that uses theInfragistics control suite extensively.

To start using the controls in your own projects, you canadd them to the Visual Studio .NET Toolbox so you can drag and drop thecontrols onto your Web forms as with any ASP.NET server control. Once you do,you get a rich design-time experience integrated into Visual Studio .NET throughthe presentation of the controls on the designer surface, the ability tocustomize their appearance quickly through the Properties window, andassociated property editors. If you want to go beyond the basics, you won'tfind the controls limiting in any way.

The controls all expose extensive customizationcapabilities through detailed collections of styles and properties for all theelements and behaviors that comprise the controls. You can set and view thesestyles in the designer and have a good sense of what you are getting evenbefore you run. Style presets let you select through the property editors whereyou can choose from several predefined styles. This saves you from doing a lotof property tweaking to get a handsome interface quickly, but you still havethe power to go in and twiddle the properties all you want to get exactly thelook and feel you need. Many of the editors have drag-and-drop capabilities forembedding child controls.

The Infragistics controls also expose a great deal ofpower on the coding side of the equation. They expose a rich object modelconsistent with other controls in the .NET Framework for coding on the serverside. Many of the controls are template-driven, so you can customize the lookor layout of the control and set up data binding in the server control markupwithin your pages and controls. The other thing the controls expose that isunavailable in most ASP.NET server controls is a massive set of client-sideevents and scripting capability that let you push your custom event-handlingcode to the client side for a more responsive user experience.

UltraWebToolbar lets you define both vertical andhorizontal toolbars that can contain collections of controls you define. Therendering engine for these toolbars is fine-tuned from previous versions ofNetAdvantage to give you better rendering performance and to look just likeWindows toolbars if so desired. You can embed custom controls, handle events inJavaScript on the client side, and choose from a number of predefined formattingstyles that let you quickly achieve the look and feel of various types ofWindows toolbars.

UltraWebTab lets you create tabbed interfaces to containother sets of controls or pages so you can navigate between them easily withoutmoving from page to page. You can drag and drop child controls, and you getcomplete control over the images that compose the tab itself. You have muchflexibility in defining the location and orientation of the tabs relative tothe content area, and now you can set a Disabled property that presents aconfigurable style for disabled tabs and prevents user selection of those tagsuntil they are enabled again.

UltraListBar provides an Outlook- or Windows XP-styleExplorer bar that lets you navigate through groups of items. It uses item andgroup selection events to trigger changes in the rest of your UI or to performappropriate processing. You can set what images display for each item and groupheader, and you can customize the look of the groups. UltraListBar supportsdrag-and-drop design using templates in Visual Studio .NET's designer window.It includes runtime animation effects such as a full Windows application ifdesired, and it even supports client-side drag-and-drop layout customization atrun time.

NetAdvantage contains much more than the controls I'vementioned. In Vol. 1 of the suite, UltraWebGrid was the control with thebiggest improvements. Using this control, you quickly can create hierarchicalgrids that use a load-on-demand feature to avoid sending too much data to theclient at once. You also can merge similar cells in adjacent rows, or you canadd dropdowns that present multiple columns of data. You can do multicolumnsorts on the server or client side, and you can have client-side columnreordering or row selection with scripting events for everything the user isdoing.

Overall, there is a great deal to be said about theNetAdvantage controls for ASP.NET development, as well as Windows Formsdevelopment. When using the ASP.NET controls, you still need to consider thetrade-offs in UI richness vs. download and page-rendering speed. To addressthis problem, Infragistics has focused this release on reducing the footprintof the controls' view state, achieving close to a 25 percent reduction acrossthe board. All in all, I think Infragistics still leads the pack in ASP.NETcontrols.

Rating:

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

Price: Starts at $495