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Infragistics NetAdvantage Ultimate Adds jQuery Controls
NetAdvantage Ultimate 2011 Volume 1 includes a jQuery control toolset, new theme support, extended support for ASP.NET and WinForms, and enhanced Microsoft Word interoperability.
.NET development tools and component maker
Infragistics on Monday released NetAdvantage Ultimate 2011 Volume 1, the latest version of its comprehensive component and controls tool suite for .NET platforms.
New to this release is NetAdvantage for jQuery, a collection of cross-platform, client-side controls based on the open source jQuery JavaScript library. The suite includes data source, date picker, file upload, grid, rating and video player controls, as well as a number of editor controls. The new control suite, available separately or bundled with the NetAdvantage Ultimate product, enables Infragistics to address fast-growing interest in ASP.NET MVC and HTML 5 development.
"If you talked to Microsoft three years ago, which we did, they had no idea [MVC] would take off the way it did. It's telling if you go to any MVC talks, they're full," said Jason Beres, vice president of Product Management at Infragistics. "As MVC gets more tooling with Visual Studio, developers will take it more seriously as a RAD tool and will be able to take advantage of its new capabilities."
The emerging HTML 5 specification has also gained strategic support from Microsoft, most recently articulated during Microsoft's reveal of the Windows 8 client operating system. Microsoft plans to enable an HTML 5 and JavaScript native development environment for Windows 8 apps, which should open the doors for a much larger community of developers to build Web-connected apps for the new operating system.
Infragistics also added theme support to the NetAdvantage package, said Beres. "We've added a new IG theme, which is the default look now, so the controls when you put them in your application look much nicer and you don’t have to apply a style."
Included in the jQuery control suite is support for DOM Virtualization, enabling the data grid to quickly and efficiently load and scroll very large data sets. Performance of CSS 3 is also improved by eliminating img tags and using CSS 3 image sprites to reduce HTTP requests and speed page loads. Infragistics also extended support for Microsoft Office and other formats, enabling interaction with Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PDF/XPS files within .NET-based jQuery Web applications.
Infragistics also updated other control suites in its Ultimate bundle. NetAdvantage WinForms gains a new Ribbon customization capability that gives end users the ability to adapt the user interface. NetAdvantage ASP.NET gains an HTML 5 video player control and the WebUpload control for uploading single or multiple files.
NetAdvantage Ultimate 2011 version 1 is available now and starts at $1895. Pricing for individual platform packages start at $995.
About the Author
Michael Desmond is an editor and writer for 1105 Media's Enterprise Computing Group.