NetAdvantage for Web Client :: Silverlight December 2008 CTP

Today we released the first public CTP (Community Technology Preview) of our new product, NetAdvantage for WebClient :: Silverlight.  NetAdvantage for WebClient :: Silverlight is focused on providing you with Silverlight controls designed to help you create amazing line of business application user experiences on the Silverlight 2 platform.  You can download the CTP here. 

If you haven't already done so, I would also recommend downloading the Silverlight 2 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 as well as Expression Blend Service Pack 1.

The CTP release includes six brand new controls, all build from the ground up to leverage the capabilities of the Silverlight 2 platform, including the ability to use Silverlights styling and templating capabilities to control your applications look and feel:

XamWebGrid

XamWebGrid gives you a high-performance, flexible grid control for Silverlight. 

For our first CTP release of the grid control we were primarily focused on the core grid infrastructure, including core grid layout and performance.  Our goal was to make the fastest grid we could with as small a memory footprint as possible.  By using a variety of data and UI virtualization techniques (which are generally transparent to you the developer), we are able to handle binding to data sources containing hundreds of thousands of records.   Additionally, the control includes a nmber of other core features like several different specialized column types (TextColumn, CheckboxColumn, UnboundColumn), auto-column generation including the ability to automatically detect and generate hierarchical data layouts, column moving and column pinning. 

In our next sprint, we will continue to focus on refining these existing features, continue to look for ways to improve performance (we have actually already found several new perf optimizations we can make) and adding more core grid behaviors including Selection and Sorting.   Our plan for v1 is to have a full featureset in the grid including inline editing, filtering and lots of other goodies.

XamWebTree

XamWebTree lets you add a tradition hierarchical data pattern to your application. 

The control supports binding any number of levels to the control and can bind to different objects are each level in its hierarchy.  Each level is also fully templatable.  You can also easily add bi- or tri-state checkboxes to nodes as well as drag and drop nodes within the tree to reorder them. 

Not only are nodes templatable, but the control allows you to template the entire layout of the control:

XamWebOutlookBar

Add the oh so familiar Office 2007 Outlook Navigation bar to you applications.  The control replicates all of the behaviors of the Outlook navigation bar, including collapsing the control, adding N number of groups, Group Overflow Tray and runtime control customization.

The contents of each group included in the control is completely customizable, or you can bind some data to the control and use a DataTemplate to control the group contents.

XamWebMaskedEditor & XamWebNumericEditor

Two small, but handy controls, the XamWebMaskedEditor and XamWebNumericEditor controls give you easy ways of managing the data input in your application. 

XamWebSpellChecker

Finally, we've ported our SpellChecker library to Silverlight.  You can use the core spell checker library API's to manually add spell checking to your application, or use our XamWebSpellChecker component to add spell checking capabilities through drag and drop.  The XamWebSpellChecker dialog includes a default dialog window, which of course you can completely customize.  We are also including 8 different language dictionaries, and of course your end users can create custom user dictionaries.

NetAdvantage for Data Visualization

Of course while were talking about CTP's, don't forget that we released a CTP of our Silverlight-based Data Visualization controls a month ago, including Chart, gauge controls, Map and segmented display controls and Timeline:

 

We've published a bunch of samples for both the NetAdvantage for WebClient :: Silverlight and NetAdvantage for Data Visualization on our labs site:

http://labs.infragistics.com/silverlight/lobsamples/

http://labs.infragistics.com/silverlight/datavisualizationsamples/

The samples are also included in the CTP downloads so you can get up and running quickly.  We also have a Forum where you can ask questions, give feedback and get support directly from the developers who are writing the controls.