Log in to like this post! jQuery/HTML5 suite, Word Library, Network & Org Chart and much more coming in NetAdvantage 11.1 Derek Harmon / Thursday, April 7, 2011 There is a lot of great stuff in this next volume release we will be shipping in June, not only new features to our existing products, but entirely NEW products for jQuery, Reporting and Mobile! You may have seen some of the new controls and features we had planned in our Product Roadmaps, but those did not comprise the exhaustive list of everything our R&D teams created. Let's take a look at some of the new controls and features that are coming in 11.1. ASP.NET Our ASP.NET product roadmap describe a number of new features for the ASP.NET AJAX grids, but those are only the tip of the iceberg. We've included new controls and features that we've heard you asked for. ASP.NET Upload Control In this release, we're including an ASP.NET AJAX upload control that can transfer multiple files at once, do so in the background so your users can continue interacting with your Web application, and show the progress of these files (individually and in aggregate) so users always know how much longer their file transfer has to go. More ASP.NET Features There really are a lot of new features for the ASP.NET AJAX grids, including several that weren't mentioned on the roadmap, like Row Edit Templates for the WebHierarchicalDataGridTM. There's a new Persistence Framework that will make serializing and deserializing user settings much easier, and I was able to find out both ASP.NET AJAX grids will implement an ISupportSerialization interface to automate their support for the persisting their complex properties and collections. Through cross-fertilization between the ASP.NET and jQuery Teams, we're also going to deliver a HTML 5 Video Player in this next release. Windows Forms We continue to invest heavily in Windows Forms, so you know with each volume release that you can count on us to stand by this platform. Office Integration In this next release, Office Integration runs across all of our platforms-ASP.NET, Windows Forms, WPF and Silverlight Line of Business, even jQuery! First and foremost, the new Word Library will give you the ability to create and work with Microsoft Word document files, with the ability to write out styled text, hyperlinks, images, tables, shapes, and customize quite a bit more about your document's features. We've also been busy making it easier for your to stream the WinGridTM into a Word document, with a new lightweight component called the WinGridWordWriterTM that can do it in just a couple of lines of code. You'll be able to quickly and easily export the content of your Formatted Text Editors and the Formatted Link Labels to Word documents. So there are going to be two ways of creating Word documents, either using a high performance, forward-only writer model or using the high power object model to handcraft your documents. More Windows Forms Features Ribbon End User Customizations is aimed at helping you deal with all of the customizations your application's users may want to make to their Office 2010 or Windows 7 Scenic Ribbon, so we enable these customizations out-of-the-box. Your application's end users gain complete control over the application's user experience. WPF Line of Business Because we take advantage of our Unified XAML Product Strategy, that is, the way our WPF and Silverlight controls share that same code base and APIs, you can do more while having to learn less. What you can count on then, is that pretty much anything you see going in our WPF products, will also be added to the Silverlight product. Scheduling One of the biggest new features added to our XAML scheduling controls has to be the Exchange Data Connector,which gives you a leg up when you're leveraging your organization's existing MS Exchange Server data. Next, if you're trying to mimic the Outlook 2010 user experience, we've included new Task Dialogs with a percentage complete field, Activity Dialogs and Journal Dialogs. Several UI elements like day and schedule view headers, and calendar groups, now support dynamic Resizing, too! More WPF Features There is more in this WPF Line of Business release, especially if you like calendars. The new compact month control for date navigation looks nifty, and the system calendar-style control emulates the user experience found in the Windows 7 system calendar to the letter. Like all of our Line of Business platform controls, WPF also gets it's share of the Office Integration support in this release, with its own Word library and data grid writer. Silverlight Line of Business Because of the Unified XAML Product Strategy, the Silverlight Line of Business controls have everything that the WPF Line of Business controls had, but because the grid implementation is slightly different with the Silverlight Team, they were able to further enhance it's functionality. Richer Grid Experiences Already the fastest grid on the market today for Silverlight, we're now making it the most feature rich, too! Merged Cells will let your grids display like-data in a given column so that adjoining cells are merged together. Data Annotations let you apply attributes (DisplayFormatAttribute, EditableAttribute, and several others) so that you can integrate RIA Services in with our Silverlight grid much more easily. A new ComboBox Column streamlines the insertion of a Silverlight ComboBox control into our grid's data cells. Other new features for grid fans include support for an ActiveItem and the ability to set the SelectedDateFormat string. More Silverlight Features Does your Silverlight app speak Russian, Gaelic, or Esperanto? It can now, because we're adding support for localized resource files across all of our Silverlight LOB controls (you'll still have to supply the translated strings, of course.) Now you localize your application to your market's specific cultures, locales, and languages. Another new control for Silverlight is the Silverlight docking manager. Designed for when you need to provide versatile layout and docking capabilities in your application, it achieves greater parity with the docking capabilities our WPF developers have been accustomed to for quite some time. jQuery (and ASP.NET MVC) Whether you're doing online video streaming or harvesting crowd opinion, our jQuery controls (with helpers for ASP.NET MVC development) have formed into a well-rounded toolset. They're led by the jQuery grid and jQuery data source, two powerful controls with rich functionality and performance that you can use to create powerful client-side apps, even using the jQuery grid to replace static HTML tables, to add sorting, filtering and paging capabilities that hadn't existed before. IG Theme We've designed a new theme for all Infragistics controls that is this nice, clear, light blue theme, and it is something we are making available across all platforms as the IG Theme. With it, you can style all controls end-to-end in your applications with a complete and consistent visual theme, without making a lot of custom style settings for each control. Our jQuery designers took this one step further, ensuring that the IG Theme would be fully compatible with Theme Roller (part of the jQuery UI). More jQuery Features It's one thing to do online video streaming, but it's another to make money from it. That's where the capability to embed advertisements in our jQuery video player control will help your applications. jQuery developers also get Office integration (extra in fact, to catch-up with our current Office interoperability), because we're including .NET class libraries for Word, Excel, and PDF/XPS document creation with our jQuery controls (these will require you have .NET on the server-side.) WPF/Silverlight Data Visualization We continue to focus on performance to handle tens or hundres of thousands of data points in charting, graphics and visualizations. In fact, I have a whitepaper in my Outbox soon to be published on this pioneering performance work that we've done for charting, but that's another story. Network Node Diagram This is a new control that helps you create visual representations of network relationships, whether they are simple or complex. Anything, from companies in a supply chain to social networks can be uniquely visualized in this diagram control because it paints a picture of each data point's connectedness to other data points. We make it easy for end users to pan and zoom, and you can customize the types of metadata that are displayed and how they should be shown. Other WPF/Silverlight Data Visualization Features There's more... in a Barcode Reader capable of reading a number of barcode symbologies, like QR codes, EAN/UPC, Interleaved 2 of 5, and others. There is also new support in the WPF OLAP pivot grid for connecting using XMLA with Oracle databases, and Sortable Columns among its several feature enhancements. Data Charts There are new charts like Bubble chart and Radial Line series andBar chart, Funnel chart, and Stacked chart types have been added in preview form. Plus there are additional formulas to help with computing the Mean, Median and Variance, to name a few. More WPF/Silverlight Data Visualization Features Joining the Org Chart and Drag and Drop Framework (previously in CTP) is a new Pie Chart control. This is highly configurable, with a custom threshold to govern what data items get included in the "Other" category, and the ability to create exploded pie charts. Our Silverlight Data Visualization controls also join our Silverlight LOB controls in that they now support Microsoft UI Automation, for greater accessibility. Reporting and Mobile By the end of April we will ship Community Technology Previews of our new Reporting Tool and Windows Phone 7 UI components. Both of these products will be included in our NetAdvantage Ultimate toolset, as well as being sold separately when released. If you're a NetAdvantage for .NET subscriber, remember that you can always upgrade just by calling our Sales Team so that you can be assured of having these products as part of your subscription when they ship. Reporting We're very excited about the industry-first, 100% Silverlight and WPF reporting experience we've put together based around a Report Viewer (that can work either locally within the client, or remotely going back to the server over a WCF Reporting Service), Report Designer, Report Data Explorer (allowing access to everything from SQL databases to the Entity Framework), and an Expression Editor. That all-important Office integration is also there, with the first volume release of our reporting product to include both export to PDF and Microsoft Excel workbooks. Windows Phone 7 Our first release of Mobile controls will target the Windows Phone 7 application developer with optimized, full-featured controls attuned to Microsoft's Metro user experience guidelines. They are going to include our Data Chart (with financial charting and analytics built-in), Barcode, Barcode Reader, Gauges, Slider, Map, and many more. Stay tuned for the appearance of our Windows Phone 7 samples browser in the Windows Phone Apps Marketplace, and the release of our first CTP this month. The Ultimate Advantage The NetAdvantage Ultimate subscription includes all of our LOB controls for ASP.NET, Windows Forms, WPF and Silverlight. Plus new jQuery/HTML5, WPF/Silverlight data visualization, Report Writer and Windows Phone 7 UI components. Later this year we will ship iPhone, iPad and Andriod UI components to be added to the NetAdvantage Ulitmate subscription. We continue to deliver consistent stylability, high levels of performance and user experience, and the solid support you can expect from a company that's been the industry leader for over 20 years. If you're not already a NetAdvantage Ultimate subscriber, I'd encourage you to call us and upgrade today.