Why “Ultra”?

Have you ever wondered why we have some controls (like those for Windows Forms or ASP.NET) that are named UltraGrid, UltraChart, or UltraWhatever, but in the Documentation, Web Content, and Samples, the same controls are named WinGrid, WinChart, and WinWhatever? Here’s your answer!

Ready for a bombshell? We really just used the word “Ultra” as a prefix for all of our controls because it sounded cool! Hey, the early 2000’s were simpler times.

For many years, our documentation, web content, and conversations referred to the controls as “The Ultra[whatever] Control”, but as Infragistics grew and developed a Marketing department, it was decided that “Ultra” sounded kind of silly and the controls needed to be marketed differently. So began the online marketing and documentation naming of WinGrid, WinChart, WinSchedule versus UltraGrid, UltraChart, and others.

So, for example, WinSchedule is a marketing name that represents a batch of individual controls such as UltraCalendarView (WinCalendarView), UltraCalendarInfo (WinCalendarInfo) and so forth. WinEditors (there is no “UltraEditors) that represent a batch of individual controls such as UltraMaskedEditor (WinMaskedEditor), etc. Now you can start to see the pattern, right?

So, whenever you see Ultra or Win, remember: the “Ultra” naming always refers to the controls and components that you will find in your Microsoft™ Visual Studio™ toolbox. Those are the names you look for when you want to drag and drop controls onto your form design surface. In marketing, documentation, and samples, you will see the same controls named with the prefix “Win”.

Some of you may be thinking, “Well, if they decided to not use “Ultra” and they changed the online materials to “Win”, then why are there controls and components still named “Ultra”? It’d be so simple to just change their names!”

To be honest, we could make such a change; however, that simple change would cause a devastating breaking change catastrophe to more than 90% of our customer base! All of the apps our customers have created would completely break, and every line of code that refers to any of those controls would be broken! So it’s not so simple.

And there you have it – now when you’re playing Infragistics Trivial Pursuit with your friends, you can proudly be the one with the correct answer to “Why does Infragistics use Ultra?”