Infragistics has combined the best-of-breed products into one positively jam-packed solution. Along with the familiar, easy-to-use interfaces of Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office and Windows Explorer, UltraSuite provides the most innovative grid available — UltraGrid — and UltraToolBars is loaded with functionality. With 45 controls, they have included everything necessary to create solutions that look great and run efficiently, faster than ever before. There's nothing like the productivity, flexibility and support of UltraSuite.
Image Gallery - Click Image to Enlarge
Item Comparison
CD-Key CD-Keys are simply unlock keys for software on Infragistics CDs that you may already possess (i.e. if you already own an Infragistics product.) They can also be used to unlock downloadable software
In the ten years since VB changed the way we develop Windows software, a whole industry has arisen to use and support visual development tools. Two leaders of that industry, ProtoView Development and Sheridan Software Systems, both entered the component market at its birth and have been major players in it ever since. Both companies have developed prolific collections of components and tools that have extended the visual development paradigm and saved programmers countless hours of coding. Now the two companies have merged to form a new entity - Infragistics. Since both companies have been prolific in their development efforts, the merged company has quite a line of products on their hands. Infragistics has combined the Sheridan and ProtoView technologies, eliminating the overlap and creating new products that represent the best of the two companies. The aptly named UltraSuite contains most of the company's top-shelf products in a startlingly affordable package. After installing UltraSuite, you may need a second monitor just to display your toolbox. It contains 45 controls, and we're not talking about simple little one-trick-pony controls that you could cook up on your own in no time flat. Most of them are either heavy-duty, feature-rich mini-applications or part of a collection of related controls offering unique, useful functionality. This is one serious piece of software. Topping the UltraSuite are two products that represent the vanguard of Infragistics' product line. UltraGrid 2.0, the most recent grid control to hit developer's screens, was engineered specifically to handle Microsoft's new OLE-DB/ADO data access technology. It handled hier-archical data beautifully, and its formatting and programming features were a dream. And with new printing and print preview capabilities, displayed data can look great on paper, too. This is easily one of the most completely programmable controls I've seen, with an object model that just won't quit. Good looks are included too, with built-in eye-candy capabilities that will make your mouth water. UltraGrid's other controls focus on data input and display, each providing a must-have feature or cool innovation combined with a little visual gee-whiz: the ComboBoxEx combo, the DropDownEdit text box with history list, the Spin text-with-spin-buttons control with its "spin bar", and the Currency, Numeric, and Date Input controls for displaying and retrieving specifically formatted information.
Ultra #2 is UltraToolBars, a multi-talented set of UI controls that made my VB app look like part of the Office XP team. The eponymous toolbar control provided all the cool UI functionality of the Microsoft Office apps: docking toolbars and menus, drop-down and fly-out buttons, end-user customization, and more. I used the integrated tab control to speedily assemble some tabbed dialogs. Then, to put something on those dialogs (and other forms in my app), I turned to its range of input controls - a clean-looking splitter interface, plus button, check box, option button, frame and panel controls, all with sound, animation, transparency, custom graphics, and other goodies. The Transition control let me add nifty PowerPoint-style transitions directly to my VB forms. The Splash control created non-rectangular forms, and the Scroll control helped me cram more controls into a tiny work area than was probably good for me.
Next, I looked at ActiveTreeView, a fully capable tree control that supports colors, pictures, and different text styles. This control provided a rather ingenious system of working with data that, although not code-free, was actually a lot more flexible and powerful than standard data binding. The control featured virtual, semi-virtual and AddItem load styles, each of which could be applied independently to different levels of the tree's hierarchy. If you need a data-aware, dedicated tree control, ActiveTreeView would be a great choice. Some UltraSuite components seemed to deconstruct MS Outlook's innovative organization and scheduling features and to make them available to your programs. Data Explorer merged an Outlook bar control with a slick navigation and display interface reminiscent of the views in Outlook XP. ScheduleX took Outlook's calendaring features and broke them out in component form. Data Explorer combined the best elements of a tab and tree interface with a set of flexible data "viewers." It also featured built-in splitter bars to separate the various parts of the interface. The tree portion of the control combined a Windows Explorer-like navigation tree with a series of customizable tabs. The result is an information navigator just like the one found in Microsoft's HTML Help window. The viewer portion of the control supported multiple view panes, including list view, edit view, web browser, MS Office document, VB forms, MFC dialogs, and even COM components. As a result, I could see several applications right off the bat for integrating existing data and components I had written into another application. What's even better is that all this functionality is supplied by a single control - drag it, drop it, and it's ready to go.
Complementing these features, ScheduleX handled the scheduling piece of the equation, with a Calendar that provided multiple monthly views, a DayView for scheduling appointments on an hourly basis, and a TaskPad for keeping to-do lists with due dates. Each control was faithful to the Outlook interface and provided much of the same functionality. I easily set alarms for appointments created in the DayView, and I could even specify a program to be run when the alarm went off! These controls had plenty of nice touches, such as the built-in dialog that you can display for the end-user to create or modify appointments. A few other controls rounded out the ScheduleX package, providing streamlined date and time data input features. The Date Input control was particularly nice, displaying a configurable drop-down calendar for date selection that could show views ranging from one to twelve months. Whew! I think that's everything! For any developer who wants to do serious corporate-level development, and whose applications will be held to the standards set by the leading Microsoft products, UltraSuite is a smart choice. It has everything you need to build powerful applications in less time, with extremely polished looking results. If you want to code it, UltraSuite can help!
No comments:
Post a Comment