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New Looks for Old Apps


Infragistics’ NetAdvantage updates look and feel of applications without touching underlying logic

By P J Connolly
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December 15, 2006 —  Sometimes, developers need to keep an application looking up to date even when there is no need to change the underlying logic, and the launch of the new Office 2007 interface just raised the bar for user interface design. Even if one assumes that it will take years before a majority of corporate desktops will be able to fully exploit the most advanced capabilities of the Windows Presentation Foundation, power users will demand slicker-looking applications sooner, if not already.

Infragistics unveiled its solution to the problem of how to quickly update the look and feel of an application last month, in the form of NetAdvantage for .NET 2006 Volume 3. NetAdvantage takes two forms—one focused on client-side Windows Forms development, and the other targeted at ASP.NET applications—and works with Microsoft Visual Studio 2002 and following releases.

Infragistics chief technical evangelist Jason Beres explained that the company saw the new UI paradigm as an opportunity for developers. “Our goal is to reduce time-to-market [and] increase ROI by taking the latest and greatest look and feel from Microsoft, and allowing .NET developers to rapidly create very rich, interactive applications in either ASP.NET using AJAX, or in Windows Forms.”

NetAdvantage for Windows Forms allows developers to add features including the Office Ribbon to their applications. It also offers an “eyedropper” feature for color selection and multiple options for previewing application resources. The “Used By” list in the NetAdvantage Style Explorer picks up where the Infragistics Role Editor leaves off; developers can now define the resources used by user interface roles, in addition to the roles used by application components.

On the ASP.NET side, the new controls work with Microsoft’s AJAX implementation; the so-called Black and Blue color schemes can be easily applied to applications, and a new WebAsyncRefreshPanel allows developers to use AJAX so that end users don’t have to repost data within Web forms. “What this gives you is the ability to plug AJAX into any piece of your application without changing any code,” Beres noted.

Developers wishing to upgrade their ASP.NET projects to the new UI design standards can take advantage of a new Visual Studio add-in that allows manual, command-line and batched command-line execution, in addition to a GUI front end.

For both the ASP.NET and WinForms editions of NetAdvantage, the charting control was updated to allow more customization options, and chart settings that follow the look and feel of the Office 2007 applications were added. Other controls were updated as well, providing more features along with the new look.




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