Visual Studio 2010 and NetAdvantage
With the release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, Infragistics is dedicated to continuing its first class support for the latest version of Microsoft developer IDE. Key goals of this latest Visual Studio release include:
- Clear UI Organization
- Richer platform support
- Improved editor
- Better support for floating documents and windows
- Enhanced document targeting
- Modern operating system support, including Windows 7 and Windows Azure
As Visual Studio continues in beta and eventually releases, we will keep you updated on specific areas that we are supporting in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. The document outlines our current support policy around Visual Studio 2010, and the various aspects that each of our major products will support.
Visual Studio 2010 Support
With the release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, Infragistics has published full support for the tooling. With the release of Beta 2, we will continue to support this beta product, and will take bug reports and incidents through our normal support avenues as well as the peer to peer forums.
Product Features
Infragistics fully supports the improved productivity experience that Visual Studio 2010 brings. Each platform brings exciting opportunities to enhance the developer productivity experience that we bring to our controls and components. Each platform is highlighted below:
Visual Studio 2010 brings a rich developer experience for building Silverlight applications. The entire design time experience around Silverlight is supported, including:
- WYSIWYG drag and drop design surface
- Full Property Browser support
- Enhanced debugging
Visual Studio 2010 brings a Silverlight design time experience that Windows Forms and ASP.NET developers have been accustomed to in Visual Studio for years. The Infragistics Silverlight Line of Business and Data Visualization toolsets fully support the Visual Studio 2010 experience.
With Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft is continuing its investment in a complete Web development experience. Some key features include:
- A high-performance and standards-compliant JavaScript IntelliSense® engine
- "One Click Deployment" that quickly publishes files and configuration settings from development machines to the final deployed site
- Full support for integrating Silverlight into ASP.NET projects and solutions
- Enhanced SharePoint design time integration
In addition to supporting these key features, we are looking at the addition of native support for client-side data binding and client templates, as well as support for Script Loader, which loads all script files within a single HTTP request.
The .NET framework 4.0 includes many enhancements for WPF developers, including improved graphics performance and layout rendering, better localization support, and improved interoperability.
Key areas that we are investing in for WPF around the framework and Visual Studio 2010 include:
- Improved support for UI Automation to ensure that our controls provide a great experience with the new Visual Studio 2010 test automation
- Enhanced design-surface experience for all controls that leverages the new design surface improvements common to Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend 3
- Multi-touch support for default gestures on Windows 7
- Visual State Manager
- Improved accessibility support from the platform
- .NET 4.0 specific build of NetAdvantage for WPF
From a developer productivity perspective, the alignment of the Blend and Visual Studio design surface gives us a greater opportunity to create a consistent RAD experience when creating experiences with those tools and the NetAdvantage Win Client WPF controls.
As evidenced by our recent releases, we are continuing major investment in the Windows Forms platform. Visual Studio 2010 gives us the opportunity to deliver even more compelling experiences with Windows Forms.
Key areas that we are investing in for Windows Forms include:
- In-process side-by-side hosting enables an application to load and activate multiple versions of the common language runtime (CLR) in the same process
- Multi-touch support for default gestures in Windows 7
- Windows 7 support
- .NET 4.0 specific build of NetAdvantage for Windows Forms to take advantage of new Framework Features
In addition to the framework and tooling support, we will continue to add new controls and features to the NetAdvantage for Win Client Windows Forms toolset.
Cloud Development
With the new Windows Azure™ Tools for Visual Studio included with Visual Studio 2010, we fully support our Web Client controls running in Windows Azure. Besides support for the built in C# and VB Project Templates for building Cloud Services applications, we will be posting guidance around using NetAdvantage Web Client controls in the Azure cloud environment on http://community.infragistics.com as the Visual Studio 2010 ship date nears.