Build Effective UIs
by Don Kiely

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 .

Leverage a Coding Cheat Sheet
by Andy Clark

At the heart of FMS' Total .NET SourceBook is a Microsoft Access database containing code that accesses databases, works with forms, and performs numerous common .NET activities. This useful product gives you a handy repository for searching this code and merging it into your .NET projects. Rather than rummage through old coding projects and training books for key techniques, you can keep key code samples in SourceBook to have the techniques at your fingertips.

SourceBook comes with a sizable library of source code. Almost 600 samples show a variety of ADO.NET, ASP.NET, and Web services techniques. Other samples implement common functions, such as threading and e-mail. Most of the code comes as complete, documented classes or functions that are ready to include in your projects—in both VB.NET and C# in many cases. SourceBook also accommodates C++, Java, JavaScript, VB, and other coding languages, which adds to its potential as a training tool. However, few of the non-.NET source examples are populated.

SourceBook comes with two possible interfaces. It integrates smoothly into VS.NET, where you can access it by using a built-in navigator pane that supports searching the library and adding sample classes to your project automatically. SourceBook also has an easy-to-understand and well-documented standalone explorer that groups the sample functions into hierarchical folders that support browsing the code. The entire tool is completely intuitive.

SourceBook is also easy to extend. You can add individual samples, folders, and hierarchies of folders. You can use this to add sample code on new topics that are specific to your operations. You can also create your own database and use it along with the standard SourceBook database. This could be useful for separating standard code your business uses from the more general samples FMS provides.

SourceBook's biggest problem is its reliance on an Access database—not the ideal platform for businesses that want to make the tool available on an enterprise-wide basis, because it all but defeats the notion of using it as a highly accessed centralized repository. FMS has indicated that it's considering a SQL Server implementation, which would make SourceBook more valuable for many businesses.

Although there's room for FMS to improve the tool's usefulness to large development groups, Total .NET SourceBook's simple elegance is impressive. It provides a convenient place to keep all those little snippets of code you go back to time and again. It's also a great training tool and has excellent potential for encouraging development standards.

About the Author
Andy Clark is a consultant with iGate in the Richmond, Va., area. He holds PMP, MCSD, and SJCP certifications. Reach him at .

Create and Manage Help Projects
by Ken Cox

RoboHelp Office Pro for .NET X3 is eHelp's high-end suite of applications for developing online help for Windows applications. At its core, RoboHelp is an authoring environment that helps you track help topics and hyperlinks, build tables of contents, generate indexes, and compile project files for the target output. The number of supported output formats has increased with each RoboHelp release and ranges from the earliest WinHelp (HLP) files through HTML Help and on to Web pages and print manuals.

RoboHelp is an excellent authoring tool. The suite's premier components—RoboHelp for Word and RoboHelp for HTML Help—let you add, organize, and link help topics easily. Implementing conditional text, popups, rollovers, and skins is easy and enjoyable. The Single Source feature does an admirable job of formatting the same content for both electronic and print publication. RoboHelp's own WebHelp format is increasingly popular for help that looks good in any modern browser.

With the move to a .NET version, eHelp has expanded the package to include Web server technology and a Web service. RoboEngine builds on Internet Information Services and Index Server to host context-sensitive WebHelp pages and fast searches of HTML, Office, and PDF documents. The add-on installs script files, DLLs, and an Access database into its Web application to monitor site errors, generate usage statistics, and store user feedback.

A program can publish WebHelp Enterprise projects to the Web server, then call a Web service to connect context-sensitive help calls to corresponding help-page URLs. The supplied Web service example points to pages on eHelp's Web site. It works fine, but setup and configuration of the locally hosted Web service elements are complicated.

RoboHelp's print documentation covers basic scenarios adequately. Combining the five booklets into one manual would reduce the ratio of boilerplate text to useful content. RoboHelp's own online help offers good examples of output you can produce with the tool.

Despite the product's name, the overall implementation of .NET is minimalist and somewhat disappointing. You'd expect ASP.NET instead of ASP, and managed assemblies rather than COM interop for the RoboHelp APIs. You're still on your own (especially if you work for a component vendor) when it comes to integrating Microsoft Help 2.0 content with the VS.NET IDE. However, RoboHelp Office Pro for .NET X3 remains an excellent choice, worthy of enterprise-wide adoption, for creating and managing user-assistance projects.

About the Author
Ken Cox is a technical writer and VB.NET developer in Toronto. He is a former broadcast journalist and now builds e-commerce Web applications and workflow templates. Ken is a Microsoft MVP for ASP.NET and lurks in news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.aspnet. Reach Ken at .

Create a Universal File Repository
by Andy Clark

The Perforce SCM System provides a flexible system for maintaining a file repository that's ideal for Software Configuration Management (SCM). The tool's flexibility also lets you integrate the file repository into your applications.

Perforce has all the capabilities of a robust SCM tool. It lets you place source code in a central repository and track code changes. You can lock source-code modules so that only one developer at a time can work with a file. It also allows multiple users to work on a file concurrently and provides tools that reconcile the different copies. Perforce tracks file versions and labels the versions that your software releases contain. You can group changes in order to identify the work done to correct a bug or implement a change.

Perforce has a tool that compares different file versions. It can also notify users of file changes. It even lets you define triggers that fire when files change. You can use them to run batch jobs that perform maintenance chores, a feature you can leverage to automate building and testing processes within your SCM.

You manage the Perforce repository through a server that must reside on a Unix or Windows box. Windows clients can work through a standalone, Explorer-like client; a Web client; several IDEs (including Visual Studio and VS.NET, among many others); a command-line interface; and API calls. Perforce clients are also available for Unix, VMS, Linux, Macintosh, and other platforms, making Perforce ideal for cross-platform development teams.

This flexibility also offers you the intriguing possibility of using Perforce's file repository for more than SCM. The API gives you the option of integrating the Perforce repository into applications that work with collaborative documents. This type of repository might not work well with heavily formatted documents, such as word-processing or spreadsheet files. However, Perforce could give you a useful toolset for managing collaborative flat-text, HTML, and XML files.

The Perforce staff is prompt, helpful, and knowledgeable, and the documentation is unusually thorough and well-written. This is one of the few products I've come across recently that provides complete paper documentation.

Perforce requires you to do a fair amount of planning and setup before it's functional. Your development group might need to give someone the job of administering the Perforce server and assisting in client configuration. Large staffs might require a full-time administrator. However, this is probably true of any SCM tool.

Perforce is a powerful tool for distributed development. The planning you must do to get the most out of it is well worth the effort, particularly for cross-platform development teams.

About the Author
Andy Clark is a consultant in the Richmond, Va., area. He holds PMP, MCSD, and SJCP certifications. Reach him at .