Dr. Dobb's | WFP, ASP.NET, and Silverlight Tools Announced

WFP, ASP.NET, and Silverlight Tools Announced

Infragistics previewed a batch of new UI controls for WPF, ASP.NET AJAX, and Silverlight applications

November 05, 2007
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/windows/wfp-aspnet-and-silverlight-tools-announc/202801823

Infragistics previewed a number of new additions to three of its NetAdvantage user-interface component packages at both the DevConnections and TechEd Europe conferences. The new components are CTP and Beta versions aimed at Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), ASP.NET, and Silverlight platforms.

Two new controls were announced for NetAdvantage for WPF: XamRibbon (CTP) and XamChart (beta). XamRibbon is a full implementation of the Office 2007 Ribbon UI, including the Quick Access Toolbar, the Application Menu, Galleries, Tabs, Contextual Tabs and end user customization. The XamChart control supports several 2D and 3D multiple chart types including bar charts, pie charts, and financial high/low charts. The charts can detect mouseovers and clicks and then drill down on the selected data.

NetAdvantage Product Manager Andrew Flick discussed the XamChart's rich UI features, "We're fully utilizing the power of the WPF platform. We're including rich lighting effects, and we have a visual design group here at Infragistics coming up with styles and themes for the chart control. We're also taking advantage of WPF's animation support, so the charts are animated and really give a good method for data visualization."

Infragistics also announced the first CTP of its web user interface framework for NetAdvantage for ASP.NET, code-named Aikido, which is built on top of the ASP.NET AJAX stack. The CTP release includes four controls built on Aikido: a WebDialogWindow, which allows both modal and non-modal dialog windows; a WebImageViewer, which provides scrollable, dragable image manipulation; a WebSplitter for multipane interfaces that are resizable and collapsible, and a WebDataGrid data-bound grid control.

Infragistics also previewed a new gauge control for Silverlight (see Figure 1). The gauge is designed for dashboard style apps or process monitors, and will provide a more polished real-time graphing of data. It will be released as a CTP later this year. The gauge demo can be previewed at www.infragistics.com/ag/gauge.

Figure 1: Infragistic's Gauge control for Silverlight