GrapeCity Updates Controls for VS2010 -- Visual Studio Magazine

GrapeCity Updates Components for VS2010

By Michael Desmond
04/28/2010

Component maker GrapeCity announced today that it has released updated versions of its reporting and spreadsheet components for Visual Studio 2010. Products updated to add Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 support include FarPoint Spread for Windows Forms 5, ActiveReports 6, Data Dynamics Reports and Data Dynamics Analysis.

FarPoint Spread for ASP.NET already supported Visual Studio 2010 in version 4. FarPoint Spread for ASP.NET 5 adds built-in support for the VS2010 Azure Development Fabric.

“We are very excited about Visual Studio 2010 and the next generation development platform from Microsoft as it aims to simplify the entire development process from design to deployment," said Rick Williamson, general manager of the PowerTools Division at GrapeCity.

Several GrapeCity products had to be specifically reworked to support the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile, a subset of .NET that significantly reduces the size of the required download to run compatible applications. The shaved down framework can pose problems for applications written for the full .NET Framework, since these apps may call on resources not available in the .NET Client Profile

Component makers were aware of Client Profile, but many were surprised when Visual Studio 2010 shipped with the .NET Client Profile as the default. That led GrapeCity and others to have to rework their component suites for the streamlined flavor of .NET.

"We had to go through and rip out code from our assemblies and put in different assemblies," said GrapeCity Product Manager Sean Lawyer, who found some positives to take away from the experience. "Going forward our developers will definitely be a lot more disciplined on how they implement their classes so they don't create so many inter-dependencies inside of an assembly. We had to open up a lot of stuff to make it work without having to refactor all of our code."

GrapeCity was founded in 1980 and boasts more than 850 employees. The company in September 2009 acquired spreadsheet component-maker FarPoint Technologies and, a year earlier in October 2008, acquired reporting component vendor Data Dynamics. Most recently, GrapeCity announced a partnership with The Imaging Source, a leading provider of word processing components for .NET. The two companies plan to work together to provide a comprehensive suite of Word and Excel like components to .NET application developers

About the Author

Michael Desmond is an editor and writer for 1105 Media's Enterprise Computing Group.

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