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Build Effective UIs
by Don Kiely

July 2003 Issue

Infragistics' NetAdvantage 2003 components suite is the most comprehensive set of user-interface and data-access tools on the market today. You can use this highly impressive collection for writing either Web or WinForms applications. Even though Infragistics still sells COM products, it has embraced .NET fully with this set of grids, charting, toolbar, navigation, and scheduling components. NetAdvantage 2003 lets you mimic any UI you want, whether you're integrating with Microsoft Office or other applications.

Even if you've used previous versions of the suite, you might be a bit overwhelmed by how much it contains now. It comprises about nine products that Infragistics also sells separately, each complex on its own. The entire suite costs less than two separately purchased products.

Each collection of components includes extensive documentation and many sample applications that give you a great deal to learn from if you take the time. If you find it difficult to see how to use the components together effectively, you can work through Infragistics' Expense Application—an ASP.NET application that's extremely effective at showing off the NetAdvantage Web tools for creating a browser-based interface with no client installation. (Microsoft should use this app to demonstrate how powerful ASP.NET can be.) It isn't included with the product, but you can run it online or download it to run locally.

All the components integrate closely with .NET, with the same look and feel at design time as Microsoft components, and they can integrate fully into the VS.NET IDE. Everything is an object—mirroring the .NET Framework—with a rich API to give your code complete control over the components. You'll discover many cool, thoughtful, and well-designed features throughout the suite.

You can get a subscription version with automatic updates for a year and full source code for the components for an additional $200. No royalty charges apply, no matter how many servers you deploy to. The cost is per developer, so you can install NetAdvantage 2003 at the office, at home, and on your laptop, making this one of the best deals available in .NET components.

Infragistics released Volume 2 of the NetAdvantage 2003 toolset in June 2003. It includes new components for WinForms (.NET) Tabs and Tab Strips, WinForms (.NET) ExplorerBar, and Web Forms (ASP.NET) ExplorerBar. Updated components in Volume 2 include enhancements to the Infragistics Presentation Layer Framework and to the WinForms Toolbar, ASP.NET Tab, and ASP.NET Toolbar. These additions and improvements give you all the more reason to get excited about this impressive product.

About the Author
Don Kiely is a senior technology consultant for Information Insights. When he isn't writing software, he's writing about it, speaking about it at conferences, and training developers in it. Reach him at .