Customer Success - Data Resolution

Data Resolution Slashes Complexity, Costs and Response Time with NetAdvantage® for Windows Forms

Data Resolution, located in Orange County California, has a mission to provide Enterprise Business Solutions for small business budgets. Serving small to mid-sized businesses mainly in the plumbing and irrigation, retail, agriculture, advertising and publishing, distribution, recruiting and non-profit (fund accounting) industries, Data Resolution's main goal is to increase the customers' business productivity by helping them realize their maximum benefit from their IT investment.

Situation

About four years ago, Data Resolution started working with Microsoft® Windows Forms to build business applications for their clients but was finding the tools inherent in the platform difficult to use and time consuming. "We really needed something that was a plug and play solution and that was easy to code," said Data Resolutions' Principal and Technical Manager Jason Mindte. Coincidentally, Mindte picked up a copy of TechNet Magazine and saw an article actually addressed the problems he was experiencing. "The article was written by someone at Microsoft who recommended using Infragistics component tool set for building immersive user interfaces for Windows Forms over Microsoft's own tools so we checked it out."

Solution

In no time Data Resolution was up and running with Infragistics NetAdvantage for Windows Forms. "When we first used NetAdvantage, it was so easy. The coding is straight forward and easy to implement," said Mindte. "I especially love the WinGrid™—it has such flexibility. It gives us the power to keep adding more and more information to it which is a must for our customers. The grid is a great entry place for those items—like in an invoice." WinGrid is a hierarchical data bound grid control with full support for bound and unbound data display. Built with extensibility in mind, WinGrid supports complex data entry scenarios, custom layouts, rich printing and print preview, Microsoft Excel® interaction and almost unlimited look and feel options.

Benefits Realized

Mindte also estimates that it takes about fifty percent less time to deliver applications to his customers because of the tools in Infragistics NetAdvantage. Mindte attributes this time savings to the fact that most of the properties he utilizes are already coded intelligently. "Once you learn where the pieces are and how they're coded, you can turn those codes on. The properties expose the classes that you already built—not all programs are like that. NetAdvantage has great depth and organization so you can quickly change a couple of properties and change the whole dynamic of the grid itself."

Another feature that Data Resolution leverages frequently is the WinGridExcelExporter™ which exports row data, headers, and summaries from the WinGrid to a binary-compatible Excel spreadsheet, which can be opened by Excel 97 or later. The export to Excel engine does not have dependencies on Excel or Microsoft Office®, which means there is no heavy overhead to accomplish export tasks. Exporting to Excel format allows users to control how layouts and appearances are applied to the data before export and which data is included or excluded. "This feature is especially useful and efficient for our customers because we give our customers the ability to load the properties and it automatically saves their changes. We keep building on their form and their settings are there so we don't have to keep reloading their settings," explained Mindte.

Improving the Bottom Line
Data Resolution has experienced a significant return on their investment in NetAdvantage. With a project that used to take 100 man hours, the company can now save ten to fifty percent of their time which drives the cost of the job down and wins them bids for new business. "What used to take 4 hours now takes us minutes," said Mindte. "With this time savings, we expect to recover the cost of the product within a month."

Mindte is experiencing these significant time savings because along with other tools in NetAdvantage, he utilizes the NetAdvantage Style Library for each of his projects. Styling every single UI role in a StyleSet is a long and arduous task, even though the concept of a completely customized style is rewarding. NetAdvantage offers Style Library Templates that automatically generate complete StyleSets at the click of a button. With NetAdvantage, once he created a themed Style Library based from a template, styling the application became as easy as choosing a color. It is possible to take regular Style Libraries for use as templates, but developers can also customize the colors of a Style Library's resources to make the template more versatile. The Style Library Generator ColorCategory Manager dialog box allows users to generate color categories, which can then be assigned to Resources or specific UI Roles. Once these color categories are created, colors can be assigned to them in the New Style Library From Template dialog box. The combinations possible are nearly limitless and the time saved is exponential.

Mindte also appreciates the subscription pricing Infragistics has in place for NetAdvantage. Since implementing NetAdvantage three years ago, Data Resolution has utilized every Windows Forms tool NetAdvantage offers at one time or another. "That's what's great about licensing," said Mindte, "we can use whatever we need when we need it."

But the real bottom line for Data Resolution is how it helps them maintain a high level of service for their customers. "The Infragistics tools do everything our customers' want, except make their coffee," joked Mindte. "But seriously, when our customers see all the feature-rich code we built for them using NetAdvantage, they love us."

About NetAdvantage

The Infragistics NetAdvantage product family empowers the developer to build and style exceptional application interfaces and user experiences across multiple platforms. Infragistics provides components for Windows Forms, ASP.NET, and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), enabling Fortune 2000 companies to standardize on one component vendor, and providing leveraged learning through consistent UIs and object models. Infragistics tools are built on a well-designed framework of UIElement™ technology and styling points, providing everything needed to create robust, high-performance application interfaces including grids, scheduling, charting, toolbars, navigation, menus, listbars, trees, tabs, explorer bars and editors.

NetAdvantage products can be purchased in individual platform-specific suites, or grouped in platform combinations. Any NetAdvantage product suite purchase includes full source code to the purchased components and frameworks, world-class developer support around-the-clock, and updates and upgrades for one year on a guaranteed release cycle. Priority support via phone, 24-hr. chat and E-Mail is also available.

For more information about Infragistics NetAdvantage and the controls described in this success story please visit:
http://www.infragistics.com/dotnet/netadvantage.aspx

For more information on the Application Styling Framework™, WinAppStylist and Style Libraries please visit:
http://www.infragistics.com/dotnet/netadvantage/appstylist/winappstylist.aspx

About Infragistics

Infragistics has been the market leader in the presentation layer components industry for over 18 years. With a comprehensive portfolio of multi-platform Enterprise Software products and services, Infragistics has achieved global reach in nearly every Fortune 2000 company. Infragistics empowers developers to build and style great application user interfaces for Windows Forms, ASP.NET, and WPF, and additionally offers user interface test tools, support, training and consulting services.