Log in to like this post! NetAdvantage for ASP.NET Product Changes in 2011 Volume 2 [Infragistics] Murtaza Abdeali / Thursday, November 17, 2011 Infragistics has been developing ASP.NET controls since the ASP.NET framework was released during early 2000s. Since then, we have provided the toolset that have helped web developers take advantage of the Microsoft’s web platform, combined with the RAD environment & tooling for Visual Studio to build rich, interactive web applications. A lot has changed since then, ASP.NET framework has undergone 5 iterations, IE is no longer the dominant browser in the public space, Visual Studio has gone through 4 iterations, and from the client technology front there have been numerous updates on HTML standards, CSS, AJAX frameworks. Today, the web talks are all about JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3 and the modern browsers including Mobile Web. These are a lot of changes, almost all the web elements from browsers, to frameworks to the client technologies have gone through iterations, the toolset that Infragistics started developing almost a decade ago was faced with some major challenges to keep up with all of these updates. The controls were not designed in a way that it could accommodate all these changes as they were happening and the code was becoming fragile as we continue to make tweaks to expand our reach as much as we could. We did not update the classic controls to support Web Kit browsers like Safari & Chrome because it would’ve required major rewriting of our rendering engine, which would pretty much mean breaking a lot of existing applications. Hence, we decided to build a new framework based on latest standard with performance in mind and modern browser support, named Aikido. We started developing the framework in late 2007 and since then any new controls we’ve shipped has been based on this new Framework. We started addressing the sunset plans for some of the ASP.NET controls with a blog that I posted early last year. We do understand that this affects many of you, and we will continue to provide support as much as we can in this area. Input and feedback have been really helpful in making sure we make this transition and change as easy as possible for customers who plan to upgrade to our lasted framework stack. Here are some of the commonly questions asked: What controls are retiring? After going through the list of all the ASP.NET controls, the following controls were flagged as classic due to the fact that the code base was old and we were not able to expand browser reach on those. WebGrid WebCombo WebDateChooser WebListBar WebCalendar WebToolbar UltraWebTab WebDataInput WebTextEdit WebMaskEdit WebNumericEdit WebDateTimeEdit WebPercentEdit WebCurrencyEdit WebMenu WebTree WARP Panel WebPanel WebNavBar WebWeekView WebGridExcelExporter WebGridDocumentExporter What is the sunset policy? The details of the sunset policy & timeframe have been posted on my blog. The controls listed above are no longer part of the product starting 2011 Volume 2 release. These controls are going to be maintained until June of 2012. Developer support on these controls will be available until Q1 of 2014. Since 2010 Volume 1, these controls were taken out of the Visual Studio toolbox, if you need to locate them in prior releases, refer to this help article. What options do I have? You don’t have to upgrade if you don’t need to. The controls support the latest versions of Firefox and IE, so if these two are your primary browser targets, then you continue to maintain your existing applications. If you are looking at upgrading application framework over to ASP.NET MVC or are planning to do pure client-side UI development using JavaScript or jQuery, then check out our NetAdvantage for jQuery product, it is meant to cater to such type of web development needs. On the other hand, if you want to continue to develop on ASP.NET Web Forms and have a need to take your application to Web Kit browsers or take advantage of the Aikido architecture like light weighted ness, and more standard compliance controls, then you’d have to replace the old control with the new one, and wire up the client and server events and functionality accordingly. Here are the one on one replacement for the controls that we are retiring: Classic ASP.NET Control New Aikido-Based Controls/Replacement WebGrid WebDataGrid , WebHierarchicalDataGrid WebCombo WebDropDown WebDateChooser WebDatePicker WebListBar WebExplorerBar WebCalendar WebMonthCalendar WebToolbar WebDataMenu UltraWebTab WebTab WebTextEdit WebTextEditor WebMaskEdit WebMaskEditor WebNumericEdit WebNumericEditor WebDateTimeEdit WebDateTimeEditor WebPercentEdit WebPercentEditor WebCurrencyEdit WebCurrencyEditor WebMenu WebDataMenu WebTree WebDataTree WARP Panel MS Update Panel WebPanel WebExplorerBar WebNavBar Custom Pager Templates with Aikido Grids WebWeekView Old UI, No longer supported in MS Outlook WebGridExcelExporter WebExcelExporter WebGridDocumentExporter WebDocumentExporter I am in the middle of migrating over to the new toolset, how can I use both Classic & New Controls? You can continue to use both the controls if you are on 2011 Volume 1 or earlier. Starting 2011 Volume 2, the classic controls are no longer going to be part of the product. Hence, in order to continue to maintain your applications that use classic controls, we have hosted “Version-Less” assemblies of them. It may require manual upgrade of your projects, but will allow you to continue to use classic controls until you are fully migrated over to the new toolset. You can download the version-less assemblies from the links below. If you are on CLR 4 you need only assemblies for CLR 4 If you are on CLR 3.5, you'll need assemblies for CLR 3.5 (2011 Volume 1) and assemblies for CLR 3.5 (2011 Volume 2) You will find an upgrade guide in the zip which contains instructions on how to apply these assemblies to your projects. Where can I find help migrating to new controls? Based on the feedback we’ve gotten so far, most of the customers find the grid control replacement to play a major role in the upgrade since it has the most code written around it, rest of the controls are fairly easy to move up. We have created a cheat sheet to help out understand the features and functionality of the new grid and how to configure them. http://community.infragistics.com/blogs/craig_shoemaker/archive/2011/07/11/introducing-the-webdatagrid-webhierarchicaldatagrid-cheat-sheet.aspx Does the new grid support all the features of the old grid? One of the things we’ve worked on side-by-side during the sunset planning is maintaining a feature parity matrix. This allows us to have the new grid be compatible to the most commonly used features available as the old one before we retired it. After you go through the list, you will find that the new grids have some features that the classic UltraWebGrid was never able to support. Feature UltraWebGrid WebDataGrid WebHierarchicalDataGrid Hierarchy yes NA yes Editing yes yes yes AJAX yes yes yes --Load On Demand yes yes yes ----Manual yes yes yes ----Automatic yes yes yes --AJAX Events yes yes yes --Virtual Scrolling yes yes no Templating yes yes yes --Column Template yes yes yes --Header Template yes yes yes --Footer Template yes yes yes --Empty Template no yes yes --Error Template no yes yes --Instantiating at Runtime yes yes yes --Access Template Controls yes yes yes --Band Templates no no no Bound Mode yes yes yes --DataSet yes yes yes ----DataTable yes yes yes --IEnumerable yes yes yes --Self Related tables no NA yes --DomainDataSource no yes yes --AccessDataSource yes yes yes --SqlDataSource yes yes yes --ObjectDataSource yes yes yes --LinqDataSource yes yes yes --XmlDataSource yes NA yes --HierarchicalDataSource yes NA yes Unbound Mode yes yes yes Client Side Functionality yes yes yes --Adding Rows/Events yes yes yes --Editing Rows/Events yes yes yes --Deleting Rows/Events yes yes yes --Cell/Row/Column Selection yes yes yes --Keyboard Events yes yes yes --Mouse Events yes yes yes --Dynamic Styling yes yes yes --Cancel Actions yes yes yes Validation Support yes yes yes Hidden Columns yes yes yes Unbound Columns yes yes yes Merged Cells yes CTP CTP MultiColumn Headers yes Yes yes Copy and Paste yes Yes yes Keyboard Navigation yes yes yes 508 Compliance yes yes yes Export to Excel yes yes yes Export to PDF yes yes yes Paging yes yes yes --Custom Paging yes yes yes --Child Band Paging no NA yes Filtering yes yes yes Summary yes yes yes Client side data binding no yes no Pinned Columns left yes yes no --Pinned Columns right no yes no Column Resizing yes yes yes Column Moving yes yes yes Tooltips yes yes yes Sorting yes yes yes Selection yes yes yes Activation yes yes yes Styling yes yes yes --Css yes yes yes --AppStyling yes yes yes --Presets yes no no Internet Explorer yes yes yes Firefox yes yes yes Safari no yes yes Chrome no yes yes CRUD yes yes yes --Auto yes yes yes --Manual yes yes yes Switching Data Sources Dynamically yes yes yes Row Selector yes yes yes Custom Schema yes yes yes Row numbering yes yes yes CalcManager support yes no no Stationary header/footer yes yes yes Null text yes yes yes Saving/loading client profile (layout) no yes yes Multi-row summaries no yes yes Ajax (loading) indicator yes yes yes What is the future of ASP.NET toolset? We are fully committed to our ASP.NET product and the future of web technologies. We want to continue helping you be even more successful using the Infragistics ASP.NET tools. This change allows us to focus exclusively on the new, modern Aikido based toolset for Web Forms developers and also our latest jQuery/HTML5 based toolset released under NetAdvantage for jQuery. We will continue to innovate as well as maintaining our market leading data grid rendering performance. As we build out new controls which target modern, RIA scenarios, we will also continue to build more of the rich, high performing line of business controls which target modern browsers and enterprise applications. Lastly, I just wanted to let you know that this decision was not an easy one for us, but something we have to do given the market trends and needs. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to me at murtazaa@infragistics.com