Success Story - Text Control

Text Control Collaborates with Infragistics to Create More Dynamic Windows Forms Applications

Text Control GmbH is a leading manufacturer of word processing components for Microsoft development technologies including ASP.NET, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation and ActiveX. For more than 20 years, their tools have helped thousands of developers add comprehensive word processing functionality to their applications. Download PDF

The Situation

When Microsoft released Office 2007 in November 2006 its most lauded feature was the Fluent User Interface, often referred to as the Ribbon. The task-oriented nature of the new interface gained instant praise that only became more popular over time. With new enhancements to the Ribbon in Office 2010, TX Text Control’s customers were eager for similar functionality in their applications when using the company’s controls.

"We knew we needed to meet our customer's needs," said TX Text Control's Product Manager and Vice President, Bjoern Meyer, "but the very nature of a ribbon control makes it more a menu than a button bar – the Ribbon belongs to the application. Given that this kind of control is not within our core competency, we began to look to our trusted partners for solutions."

Text Control reviewed Ribbon controls from four different vendors before putting the question to its customers – "Taking into consideration speed, functionality, and ease of use, which Ribbon control do you prefer?" Infragistics was the clear choice among TX Text Control customers.

The Solution

With direction from its customers, the team began creating a sample implementation that combines Infragistics Ribbon control from its NetAdvantage for Windows Forms toolset with TX Words from TX Text Control .NET for Windows Forms. The sample project, which is available as a free download on the TX Text Control site, contains adapter classes for each ribbon group that can be easily
integrated into Visual Studio and re-used in other projects.

The sample implements the most typical features of TX Text Control .NET for Windows Forms, including ribbon groups for Clipboard, Font, Paragraph, Style (including preview), Page Setup, Editing, Pages, Documents, Tables, Images, Links, Header and Footer, Text
and Symbols.

"The groundswell of excitement over this sample and the corresponding code has been overwhelming," said Mr. Meyer. "The Infragistics Ribbon control used in conjunction with TX Words enables developers to create and style visually pleasing, high performing applications. We are hearing and seeing this from our customers on a regular basis."

The sample implementation was released in April 2010 and is shipped with TX Words in TX Text Control .NET for Windows Forms. It remains one of the more popular downloads and implementations on the TX Text Control site.

About Infragistics

As the world leader in user interface development tools and experts in User Centered Design, Infragistics empowers developers to build and style immersive user experiences and rich data visualization in line of business applications across all platforms — Windows Forms, WPF, ASP.NET and Silverlight. Infragistics also has a range of value-added services including UI testing tools, support, training and consulting services. For additional information on Infragistics, products and career opportunities, please visit www.infragistics.com or call us in the U.S. at +1 (800) 231-8588, +1 (609) 448-2000, in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa (EMEA) at +44 (0) 20 8387 1474, or in Japan at +81-3-5474-8040.

About Text Control GmbH

Text Control GmbH is a leading manufacturer of word processing components for Microsoft development technologies (ASP.NET, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation and ActiveX). As the leader of word processing technologies, our products help thousands of developers add comprehensive word processing functionality to their applications. Using our developer tools, documents can be
created, edited, converted and printed. TX Text Control was introduced in 1991 and Text Control GmbH is 100 percent selfowned and independent of all investor decisions. For more information, please visit www.textcontrol.com.