What Upgrades Tell Us: DXperience, Dotfuscator, and dynaTrace
DevExpress DXperience 10.1
We reviewed the DevExpress DXperience suite, which concentrated on Windows Forms and Web controls,
some time ago. DXperience 10.1 (also called V2010 vol. 1) is now out, but it emphasizes support for WPF, Silverlight, and XAF.
On the Silverlight front, DevExpress focused on Silverlight 4. DevExpress wanted to move forward quickly in the Silverlight arena while minimizing breaking changes. While DevExpress still seems to regard WPF developers as being on the bleeding edge (though they seem to like supporting the bleeding edge) they have made significant improvements to their WPF DXPivotGrid. And if you thought that XAF was a reference to a North African currency code.... No, you were wrong. It stands for eXpressApp Framework, which appears to be a platform independent application generator (currently supporting WinForms and ASP.NET 2.0). You can find more about DXperience 10.1 here.
Preemptive Dotfuscator 4.8
More recently we looked at Preemptive Solution's Dotfuscator. As of June, the latest version of Dotfuscator now secures Silverlight, WPF, and XAML/BAML files.
As I noted in the review, it's a shame that Dotfuscator is so closely associated with code security, because the company also provides great tools for tracking your code at the client's location through their RunTime Intelligence offering. That tool is now integrated into Visual Studio 2010, so you'll be able to take a look at Runtime Intelligence there (once you upgrade). Check out Dotfuscator 4.8 here.
dynaTrace 3.5
While the changes in the two products above reflect evolving technology in the toolspace, changes in dynaTrace's application monitoring tool reflect a change in integration. We've taken two looks at dynaTrace: one at their free JavaScript product, and the other at their enterprise product.
The latest version of the tool attempts to integrate what I cared about as a developer (tracking, reporting, and monitoring a transaction through all the layers of an application) with what I cared about back when I ran an IT department (business transaction management). The company's goal is to take the application performance data that the tool produces and apply some business context (e.g. revenue contribution, service level monitoring). Check out dynaTrace 3.5
here.
On Deck: DevExpress
Finally, DevExpress has also released a new version of their add-in for Visual Studio, with new refactorings for parallel processing. In my next blog post, I'll be talking with DevExpress Chief Architect Mark Miller about the technical those new refactorings created for DevExpress.
Posted by Peter Vogel on 06/04/2010