In its successful effort to complete the Viper application on time, Ajilon used a variety of tools, including UltraWebNavi-gator, part of the UltraWebSuite set of tools from Infragistics (Cranbury, N.J.). Like Microsoft's development tools, UltraWeb-Navigator is .NET based, and was also in beta when Viper was developed.

UltraWebNavigator creates Web page items automatically, saving developers from having to write code from scratch in languages such as JavaScript. The tool consists of two components to display information on a Web page, one for a horizontal arrangement (such as menus across the top of a page), one for a vertical arrangement (such as the left pane of many pages). While UltraWebNavigator emulates the display capabilities of a Windows Explorer tree, it can also send data back to the application.

UltraWebNavigator is built on .NET classes from which developers can create their own menu classes with flexible styling options for colors, borders, and other effects. "By using the inheritance properties of these classes, all menus can look and act the same across all pages in the application," notes Bob Wolf, vice president of sales and marketing for Infragistics. Objects that control page appearance can customize displays based on the user, security levels, and other criteria.

Infragistics began using .NET to build its tools for developers in late 1999 using Visual Studio. NET, which they find very productive. They mostly code in C#, taking advantage of improvements they see over Java in areas such as metadata and object reflection. "Coders with a C++ or Java background can move to C# easily," says Don Preuninger, senior architect at Infragistics.