As you already know, wizards are a ubiquitous feature of most Windows applications. Whether designed to break-down complex data entry forms or to provide step-by-step guidance for the end-user, wizards have become an indispensible UI solution for software developers.
Though common and essential to modern Windows Forms solutions, Visual Studio itself does not provide a straightforward way in which to create application wizards. When you need introduce a wizard into your app, Visual Studio forces you to construct the basic layout, implement logic for navigation buttons, and create/manage multiple frames with different control sets within them. Ultimately, Visual Studio requires that you create a pseudo-tab control and makes you invest valuable time on things that have nothing to do with an application's business logic.
With the DevExpress XtraWizard control, you no longer have to deal with mundane and time-consuming issues such as those described above. Simply said, you drop the control and instantly turn your form into a multi-page wizard. All you need to worry about is actual page content and implementing your own navigation logic, if necessary.
Simplifying the development process and making you and your team more productive is just one benefit of using the XtraWizard by DevExpress... The others include:
Superior Appearance
Among the biggest strengths of the DevExpress Wizard control is appearance / theme management. By exploiting the features listed below, you can build elegant and highly polished interfaces with ease.
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With the XtraWizard, you can design dialogs that conform to either the Wizard 97 or Wizard Aero standard...creating standard based UIs has never been easier.
- The DevExpress WinForms Skinning / Theme engine is unequaled and the XtraWizard fully supports it… cutting-edge interfaces are only a few clicks away and you can be certain that your wizard control will look and feel the same as all other DevExpress controls within your application.
- By using DevExpress fade in/fade out effects, you can easily enhance your wizard during page transition operations.
Better Wizard Design Experience
After you've dropped a wizard control onto a form, you are offered a wizard with a minimum set of pages. All service elements (including wizard and page titles, header images, navigation buttons) are created and aligned automatically. All you need to do is provide text and images for these elements via appropriate properties.
With the XtraWizard, all design-time operations are at your fingertips. You can create as many pages as you like via the control’s smart tag. To switch between pages, you can use navigation buttons – just as you would do at runtime. When you place controls or text onto individual pages, the XtraWizard manages offsets and alignment so you don't have to take care of little details that eat up so much time and erode developer productivity.
Better Data Management
If your application requires a straightforward step-by-step guide, then you won't write a single line of code to enable page navigation when using the DevExpress Wizard control. These types of scenarios are automatically supported by XtraWizard. To create a more advanced experience that include conditional navigation or data validation for specific pages, you need only to handle the appropriate control events.
With simple wizards, you only need two events: one that fires when a page transition is about to happen, another - after it has happened. This approach is common to wizard controls and is really easy to use. On the other hand, it can require you to write complicated code when you have complex navigation paths, a lot of data validation rules or when underlying data needs to be updated with each wizard step. To make it easier to accomplish these tasks, every wizard page provides you with three events allowing you to validate data, submit changes (when going forward) or cancel them (when going back). These events make your code much clearer and thus easier to generate and maintain.
Software development is hard work. Decisions must be made early in the process that may come to be big problems years later. It can be argued that web development is even more difficult because of the visual nature necessary for a web application to draw a necessary crowd.
When beginning the development of the web application for Active Realty Solutions, we knew that our audience, real estate professionals, had a wide variety of computer skills. They are visual users who need tools that support them in their business. Enter DevExpress and their line of ASP.NET components. Back in 2007, we chose DevExpress as our component supplier of choice. Our development team did the necessary ‘trade-study' to determine which of the vendors was the right one to purchase. Now, years later, we know we purchased the right package. But why?
There is a simple answer to this question and one that all software developers will understand. DevExpress components just work. Period. This doesn't just include the user but also the developer and the SA support.
Installing DevExpress components is straight-forward and simple. Just a couple Next button clicks and files are placed in the right locations and full Visual Studio toolbox support is complete. There is nothing additional the SA person has to do. No manually putting assemblies in the cache, or moving files around to different IDE versions.
When the developer wants to add a component to a project, it is a simple drag-and-drop operation just like it should be. And most of all, the components just work and they look great to the end-user. The variety of attributes associated with the components may be the second most important part of the DevExpress components. You aren't just stuck with the base component. In some cases, there are hundreds of attributes that can dramatically change the look, feel, and functionality of the component. If that isn't enough, you can purchase the source code to the components and extend it if necessary.
Demos. The instructional materials provided by DevExpress are outstanding. Developers will tell you that APIs are fine but give them a good demo with code and nothing could be better. The demos provided with DevExpress products give you a visual example as well code examples for both the front and backend code. Many times we've been able to look at a demo and within minutes adjust our code based on the example and add valuable productivity for our customers. If a developer has a question about a component and its use, DevExpress' support team is just a forum away. Within hours, the DevExpress team will respond and many times with code examples or links to online material with the right answer to your question.
To management, the DevExpress components are a solid win. They help developers save time by giving them components that just work! You can be confident that what you see in the Visual Studio designer is what you will see on the production application. It would take many man-years to duplicate the components found in the toolkits provided by DevExpress.
Finally, DevExpress doesn't sit on their product and let it go stale. They continue to refine the components and add new ones that make sense to developer's needs today.
Joseph D. Gradecki
Active Realty Solutions
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