NetAdvantage AppStylistTM empowers designers and developers to work together more efficiently in order to create desirable user interfaces for Windows Forms and ASP.NET applications. Developers can focus on building out application functionality using Visual Studio and NetAdvantage for .NET, and designers can focus on styling those applications with a more designer-friendly tool outside of Visual Studio. Then the Application Styling Framework brings the efforts of both parties together with ease using one line of code in a Windows Forms application or via the web.config file in ASP.NET applications.
Even though the differences between the way Windows Forms and ASP.NET applications are styled is immense, NetAdvantage AppStylist reduces that difference and complexity by providing two tools--NetAdvantage AppStylist for Windows Forms (a.k.a., WinAppStylist) and NetAdvantage AppStylist for ASP.NET (a.k.a., WebAppStylist). These tools "use similar metaphors that allow designers to focus less on the idiosynchrasies of each UI platform and more on their creative process and design work," says Grant Hinkson, Director of Visual Design at Infragistics.
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Application Styling is a ground-breaking concept in ASP.NET development that allows developers and graphic designers to collaborate more efficiently. The developer creates the application, while graphic designer simultaneously creates styles that can be used in that application. When finished, the graphic designer delivers the style library to the developer who then loads it into the application with minimal coding. Developing world-class applications with a stylish look and feel to go along with it has never been easier. Whether you're a one-person shop or an enterprise-level business, everyone can reap the benefits of Infragistics' Application Styling Framework™ (ASF) – and the key to realizing these benefits is the new NetAdvantage AppStylist™ for ASP.NET product.
NetAdvantage AppStylist for ASP.NET
NetAdvantage AppStylist for ASP.NET is a stand-alone application that runs outside of the Microsoft® Visual Studio® IDE. NetAdvantage AppStylist for ASP.NET lets you style every detail of your application leveraging industry standard Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) technology. Use the simple point-and-click interface to repaint styles on the canvas like an artist. The user interface is divided into three intuitive sections:
NetAdvantage Application Styling Configuration
The NetAdvantage Application Styling Configuration Add-in plugs into the Visual Studio .NET Tools menu so that it can be used at design-time to configure and modify the ASF-related settings for your application. This Add-in allows you to:
Express Styling Styling every single UI role in a StyleSet is admittedly a long and arduous task, even though the concept of a completely customized style is rewarding. Infragistics would like to assist in this area by offering Style Library Templates that automatically generate complete StyleSets at the click of a button.
Creating a themed Style Library based from a template becomes as easy as choosing a color. When you select the File | New Style Library | New Style Library from Template menu command the New Style Library From Template dialog box will appear. Once you've selected a Style Library Template to modify, you can match colors using color categories for a unique appearance. Clicking the OK button automatically creates an entirely new Style Library for you.
Creating a Style Library Template for use in generating a themed Style Library can also save you a great deal of time, and give you the ability to customize colors for several different roles. It is possible to take regular Style Libraries for use as templates, but you can also customize the colors of a Style Library's resources to make the template more versatile. The Style Library Generator ColorCategory Manager dialog box allows you to generate color categories, which you can then assign to Resources or specific UI Roles. Once these color categories are created, you can assign colors to them in the New Style Library From Template dialog box. The combinations possible are nearly limitless.
Styling UI Roles and Resources is at the heart of application styling. These UI Roles and Resources can have images displayed in their background, making for a highly customizable Button, Tab, or other UI element. These images, however, are embeddable in the Style Library (*.isl) file, and not saved out as an actual image in an images folder. Once the Style Library is saved, it became difficult to modify images in different UI Roles. This constraint was more noticeable if you were going to share your Style Libraries company-wide or throughout the designer community.
For this release Infragistics offers you a way to recover all the images from any Style Library. By clicking the new File | Export Images... menu command, a dialog box opens, allowing you to browse to any folder, or create a new one, into which to place all of the Style Library images. Keep in mind, the image exporter will only export images in Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format. This feature should definitely be a favorite of graphic designers wishing to share their work with other colleagues.
Since the concept of Application Styling was introduced in NetAdvantage 2006 Volume 1, several developers and graphic designers alike have been creating Style Libraries for use in several different scenarios. Many of these Style Libraries have showcased our customers' great creativity and inventiveness. Their desire to share these feats of creative prowess with the community at large was only natural.
Until now, there was no way to mark a Style Library as your own. We now provide the opportunity to fill in Style Library properties with your own personal information. Upon clicking the File | Style Library Properties... menu command, an Application Style Library Properties dialog box will display. The information that you can add through these properties include: File Version, Copyright, Author, Permitted Usage, and a general Description. The Style Library Properties also track the File Name and Last Modified date although these fields are read only.
At run-time, Application Styling only supported one Style Library being loaded into memory at once. This severely limited an application's styling capability as specific controls had to use StyleSets residing in the same Style Library.
In this release, we've added the StyleLibraryName property to our stylable controls and components with a matching overload to the StyleManager.Load method. When loading a Style Library via the StyleManager, a new overload is available to help identify it. You then set the StyleLibraryName property on any control or component to match it with the specific Style Library that you loaded. This allows different controls to use their control-specific StyleSets from different Libraries, making for a much more customizable styling experience.
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