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Build .NET 2.0 Apps with ComponentOne Studio Enterprise
by Don Kiely
January 27, 2005
It's hard to imagine doing professional development without third-party tools, even all the tools Microsoft packs into Visual Studio. One of the best tool suites available, ComponentOne's Studio Enterprise is now available for Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0. The company has found plenty new to add to the suite, despite being a comprehensive package for several years and through many editions of Visual Studio.
Studio Enterprise is a collection of some 25 of the company's development products, ranging from user interface widget collections—including a couple of the best grids available—to data access components to interfaces for file formats including zip, PDF, and Excel files. It includes components for WinForms, ASP.NET, mobile, and ActiveX apps, so you can support both legacy apps and move forward with the latest technologies (see Figure 1).
The new version sports many new features specifically intended for VS 2005. Existing components are recompiled using .NET 2.0 to take full advantage of its many new capabilities. For ASP.NET apps, the new C1WebTabStrip and C1WebTreeView components help Web apps take on the appearance and responsiveness of desktop apps.
One of the more intriguing new features is the ADO.NET DataExtender, a single component for WinForms apps. It extends ADO.NET 2.0 by providing data modeling and programming that extend the relationship between bound controls and either typed or untyped Datasets, to manage the interactions between the controls and datasets in ways that used to require too much code.
Preview for .NET, a set of printing and print preview components for WinForms apps, has received an overhaul. It has seven new components that support printing, previewing, creating thumbnails, searching text, and generating a document outline.
The product includes new designers that are integrated into the VS 2005 interface, providing nice GUI interfaces for design time configuration, and new wizards simplify feature configuration. As components get ever more complex, these features beat setting dozens of properties individually when adding complex objects to your apps. The designers aren't quite as slick and comprehensive as those in Developer Express's products, but go a long way in simplifying complex interface design tasks.
The list of new features goes on and on. With this new version, ComponentOne continues to hold its ground in an increasingly competitive market for component suites. If you're already a customer, you'll certainly want to upgrade. And if you're not yet a customer, the product is worthy of consideration for your enterprise component suite.
ComponentOne Studio Enterprise for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
ComponentOne LLC
Web: www.componentone.com
Phone: 800-858-2739
Price: $999.95
Quick Facts: A comprehensive suite of components and tools for every tier in Windows, Web, and mobile apps.
Pros: Includes everything including the kitchen sink, close integration between the many products, superb online documentation, great pricing, many best of breed products.
Cons: Buying a suite means not always getting the best of any specific breed.
About the Author
Don Kiely is a senior technology consultant. When he isn't writing software, he's writing about it, speaking about it at conferences, and training developers in it. You can reach him at
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