Fast, Fast, Fast

It’s a seriously big day here at Infragistics. A big and — as you’ve no doubt guessed by the title of this post — fast day.

The real star of today’s announcement is Ultimate UI Controls for Xamarin. (Or if you’re more focused on web development, check out and Ignite UI for JavaScript/HTML5.) If you like the idea of writing your apps fast, having them run fast, and learning fast how to get up to speed, you’ll want to read on.

Write Fast

You need to build complex line-of-business apps with complex, sophisticated features (probably including grids and data visualizations). And you need to do it fast. And you need to be able to customize the look of those components. And you need them to look great.

Sound familiar? Yeah, we know it sounds familiar. That’s why we’ve just released Infragistics Ultimate UI for Xamarin . Now, don’t get us wrong: Xamarin.Forms all on its own is great — we’re fans — but delivering apps across platforms is…well…slow and clunky. With Ultimate UI for Xamarin’s ground-breaking Xamarin.Forms Productivity Pack, however, you’re going to get unparalleled time-savings and productivity. For example:

• AppMap: This is the feature that consistently blows developers’ minds. You just visually map out your app’s flow, then — with one click — generate all the Views, ViewModels and Navigation code.  Hit F5 and you’re ready to run!

• Xamarin.Forms Toolbox: We’ve invented a NuGet-powered Toolbox to design let you drag and drop widgets onto the XAML editor — no XAML knowledge required. You get automatic namespace referencing, full support for all Infragistics Ultimate UI for Xamarin widgets, and the complete set of Xamarin.Forms widgets!

• Control Configurators: With all the customization available for our controls, it’s nice to be able to configure them right in the XAML editor. You get this in a rich, design-time experience with pre-built styles and themes, built-in databinding, and WYSIWYG property editing — and no coding required. This will save you hours of development time.

Ken Rosen, Senior Director of Product Management at Infragistics, says, “This is a big deal for mobile app developers: you no longer have to choose between native polish and performance and hybrid rapid development time. With Ultimate UI for Xamarin, you get Xamarin’s code re-use, revolutionary new tools that vastly accelerate app design and setup, and Infragistic’s super-fast, scalable controls. It’s the best of both worlds.”

In short, nobody offers the productivity boost you get with Ultimate UI for Xamarin’s Productivity Pack.

And if you’re developing for JavaScript/HTML5, you’re going to want to try out Ignite UI for JavaScript/HTML5. In one easy framework you get a complete set of grids, charts and data visualizations, not to mention dozens of other controls.

All Ignite UI controls are themeable with Bootstrap and Theme Roller. You can use one of the hundreds of available themes online or use Ignite UI’s Theme Generator to create your own. Which means you can focus on building and delivering your application faster.

See? We’re all about fast. And we’re just getting started.

Run Fast

Infragistics has always been about being fast. The speed of our charts — including in the new Ultimate UI for Xamarin and Ignite UI for JavaScript and Angular — is simply unmatched. Even with large datasets, we’re top performers, and performance doesn’t degrade as the amount of data grows. And that’s true whether your data is local or streaming in real time.

Want details? Here are a few things you can expect from our just-released Ultimate UI for Xamarin:

• Fastest-Rendering: The Ultimate UI for Xamarin data grid can handle unlimited data with its virtual rendering capability.  With this comes the fastest rendering, smooth touch interactions, and customized column and row interactions.
• High-Performance, High-Volume Charting:  Sometimes you need the robustness of thousands to millions of data points rendered flawlessly on a mobile device with millisecond refresh rates and immediate touch-responsiveness. We can do that.
• Passes the Stress Test: In mission-critical applications, rendering multiple charts on a single screen with near real-time data is required.  That’s Infragistics.

Ultimate UI for Xamarin’s controls offer unrivaled performance, even when scaled to large data loads. Xuni, Telerik, SyncFusion, DevExpress—no one comes close to matching Ultimate UI for Xamarin.

And the same is true for Ignite UI for JavaScript/HTML5: it has the fastest grids and charts available. Even with large data sets, Ignite UI’s performance is unmatched; grids scrolling remains smooth and fast and charts render quickly and keep their smooth animation.

Says James Bender, Ignite UI Product Manager, “In the past web applications have suffered from the perception that they were slower and not as responsive as native applications. With Ignite UI, we’re changing that with components that perform just as well and offer the same great user experience a native application can.”

Learn Fast

Writing your apps fast is great. Having them run fast is essential. But if you don’t have the tools you need to learn how to use our tools fast, well, we’ve got a problem.

Of course, the first step is for you to download Infragistics Ultimate, which you can try free for 30 days. Or, if you’re an existing Infragistics Pro or Ultimate subscriber, the great news is you already have access to Ultimate UI for Xamarin as part of your subscription. Just download and install it.

And once you’ve downloaded Ultimate, you’re going to want to get comfortable with it. So we’re providing some great info for you help you get started quickly, learn best practices, and deep-dive into important tips and techniques for into both Xamarin and Angular.

Lessons — Read or Watch: We’ve put together a set of six Xamarin lessons - three on writing apps fast, three on making your apps run fast - that you can use to learn what this new product can do.

We’ve gone a step further with our Ignite UI for Javascript/HTML 5 and Angular lessons, with nine lessons that will get you writing fast, running fast, and working with the modern web.

Each lesson for both of these products comes in both a video and written version (not to mention code examples) so use whichever works best for you.

Reference Apps: There’s nothing like a good reference app to see how tools work in the real world. We’ve created new sample apps for Ignite UI — a financial tracker app using Angular components — and a fun app called Moo2U for Ultimate UI for Xamarin.

Free eBooks: There’s a good chance you’re learning Angular or Xamarin as part of your ongoing development efforts, and we’ve got a free eBook to help you with each of those:

• Angular Essentials: Learn Angular — from initial structuring to deployment — fast. This book gives you practical, step-by-step guidance and code examples you need to build rich web apps now.
• Top 10 Xamarin Tips and Traps: Ten quick must-know techniques and resources you can use to avoid common pitfalls as you create cross-platform mobile apps with Xamarin.Forms.

Webinar: Some of the biggest questions that come up when enterprise developers are considering native vs hybrid app development include:

• How fast can we get to market on multiple platforms?
• How do we ensure the best run-time performance?
• How do we build the most elegant UI?
• How can we differentiate against our competitors?

We answer all these questions in our webinar, “Infragistics Ultimate UI for Xamarin – Fast, Visual, Native Mobile Development”, which you can view on demand at our YouTube channel.

We’re pretty obviously excited about what’s going on at Infragistics, and we hope you are too. Be sure to stay in touch, because a lot is going on!

Follow us on Twitter (@infragistics) for more info, and feel free to reach out to us directly by emailing Brian Lagunas (Ultimate UI for Xamarin) and Jason Beres.