Improving the Visual Studio 2005 Developer Experience
Feature Complete Components - Power Packed IDE Tools - Unrivaled Development Frameworks...
Only a few days after the official release of Visual Studio 2005, Developer Express released updates across its entire shipping product line to include complete support for the new IDE and .NET 2. To learn more about the update and the new capabilities available to you within VS 2005, please review the following.
WinForms and ASP.NET Controls - Common New Features
Full Support for Smart Tags
Since our goal is not just to deliver feature-complete controls, but to radically improve your design time experience, we are excited about the new capabilities found in Microsoft's smart tags implementation. Smart tags allow us to provide you with an additional mechanism to manipulate our controls within the IDE. These small icons let us move the most important properties closer to the control and deliver frequently used tasks to your fingertips.
Smart tags don't necessarily have static content. Their available settings and actions list can change depending upon the control's state. For instance, take a look at the following screenshot to see how the smart tag's content changes for a check editor when assigning the radio group style to it.
Automatic Toolbox Integration
Our installation program automatically adds all the required Windows Forms controls into the newly created tabs within the Toolbox. You will never again have to spend valuable time searching for individual components.
WinForms Controls - New Features
Base Line and Snap Line Support
The new Visual Studio brings you two great features for easier control alignment on a form. The first feature is support for snap lines. These lines are automatically displayed when a control is the desired distance from another control or when it's edge is aligned with another control's edge. This makes control arrangement tasks a breeze making it completely visual and eliminating the need for additional alignment commands in toolbars or menus. You simply drag controls within the form and drop them when lines appear. See the following image for an example of snap lines displayed for our list box control.
One more control alignment feature in Visual Studio 2005 that is fully supported by our controls is the support for base lines. These lines are also control alignment helpers. They are displayed when the text in neighboring controls is located on the same line horizontally. This feature is great when you want to align text boxes, labels, check editors, etc by their text rather than by control edges. The image below shows how base lines can improve control layout compared to snap lines.
New Features in Our Data-Aware Components
There are two primary capabilities in our controls that relate to the new data binding features found in Visual Studio 2005. As you can imagine, the first is full support for the new
BindingSource component. This component gives you numerous new options including improved binding to custom objects.
Yet another useful feature is the ability to associate our editors with data types. This allows you to simply drag fields onto a form and create the appropriate editor (which in turn is bound to that field). For instance, the following image describes how one can associate our SpinEdit control with an integer field and to make it the default integer field editor within the app.
Once this association has been made, you can drag integer fields onto the form to create a SpinEdit control bound to the field with an accompanying label.
Similarly, you can associate our data aware controls (such as the XtraGrid) with data tables. In this instance, you can simply drag a table onto the form to create an entire grid control bound to this table and populated with columns for all data fields.
ASP.NET Controls - New Features
Full AJAX Support
ASP.NET 2 makes it easy for developers to utilize AJAX - allowing you to build much more responsive and elegant web sites. The main power behind AJAX lies in its ability to reload portions of a web page whenever a server response is required. As such, you can reload a single web control (or a portion of a control) which in turn, provides two main benefits:
- Clients download data on demand, without having to re-read the entire page. This makes web pages much faster.
- Since only a single control is updated, end-users don't see annoying web page update effects - no blank screens or flickering.
Since we fully understand and appreciate the importance of AJAX technology, we immediately updated our ASPxGrid and Editors Library to support it, and we have provided an extremely easy way to enable it. You simply set a control's EnableCallbacks property to true and the control starts to use callbacks (partial page reload) instead of postbacks (entire page reload).
DXperience v2006.2 (shipping in July 2006) will include four brand new web controls - ASPxNavBar, ASPxMenu, ASPxTabControl and ASPxSiteMapControl. These controls are specifically designed for ASP.NET 2.0 and thus fully exploit AJAX technology. For instance, a page control will only load its currently visible page to the client. When an end-user switches to another page, that page's content will be loaded via a callback. Once a page have been loaded, end-users can switch to this page right on the client. Nearly the same functionality will be available in the navigation bar control - Only expanded groups will initially be loaded onto the client. The remaining content will be downloaded on demand via callbacks.
To enable these capabilities you will again need to toggle a single EnableCallbacks property - regardless of the control you use.
New Features in Data-Aware Controls
Just like Windows Forms, our ASP.NET controls allow you to take full advantage of the new data binding methods offered by Visual Studio 2005. You can now bind the ASPxGrid and Editors Library to data via the new VS data source components. These include SqlDataSource, AccessDataSource, ObjectDataSource, XmlDataSource, etc.
