Keeping pace with Window UI features, practices

Keeping up with modern user interface (UI) patterns often means giving developers the controls they need to mimic the way Microsoft products feel to users. “Traditionally .NET developers focus on getting things to look feel and behave like users are expecting,” said Infragistics’ Andrew Flick when we talked about new UI features in Infragistics NetAdvantage recently.

Flick said some of the user interface styles end users are getting accustomed to include the Windows 7 Scenic Ribbon, collapsible tiles that can be organized through drag-and-drop and data cards, for a more compact way of displaying information. NetAdvantage’s WPF controls now let developers build these features into their applications.

NetAdvantage for .NET Volume 1 includes support for .NET 4 and a a few new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) tools, which include tiles, data cards and multi-touch for Windows 7 gestures. With this release, developers can create Windows Forms applications using the .NET 4 Client Profile in Visual Studio 2010.

Infragistics has put a lot of time into developing controls for WPF, a format which provides more extensive capabilities for building rich, multimedia-enhanced applications than Windows Forms. But WPF is not for every application. For those building user interfaces in Windows Forms, NetAdvantage now has a control for building Microsoft Project-style Gant charts that visually break down project work.

“The big feature was a new Gant chart,” said Flick. “While the market is moving towards WPF and Silverlight there are still a lot of people that still use Windows Forms.”