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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.

• 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.

The XtraWizard is part of DXperience. To obtain a fully functional evaluation version of the XtraWizard with a comprehensive demo application, please visit our download center. If you have any pre-sales questions or need additional information on this product, contact us at info@devexpress.com.