Making better presentation layers

• By John K. Waters
• February 14, 2003

One of the most attention-getting demos in the VSLive! exhibit hall -- particularly among young Microsoftees, who swung by to drool into their goatees over it -- was an application put together by Infragistics's technology evangelist, Brad McCabe. To prove that developers could achieve the look and feel of a thick-client app with a thin-client (browser-based) implementation, McCabe built a reference application using Infragistics's NetAdvantage ASP.NET components for Web navigation, menu, tabs, toolbars, trees, grids and charts. Called simply 'Expense Application,' the app involves Web services, client-side Java scripting, XML data binding and other real-world code samples, McCabe explained.

Infragistics makes reusable, presentation layer components for building Microsoft .NET, COM and Java applications. In addition, the East Windsor, N.J.-based company announced a new version of its NetAdvantage suite at the show. NetAdvantage 2003 Vol. 1 is an integrated toolset for developing the presentation layer for applications.

The suite will feature components for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003, Microsoft .NET Framework and Microsoft COM, and will include major feature enhancements of the ASP.NET Grid and Visual Studio .NET 2003, McCabe said.

For his reference application, McCabe focused on the user interface and technology examples. ''Some pages were built slightly differently to show examples of various approaches and technologies,'' he said. ''We wanted to show them [developers] more than just our own stuff. Microsoft is trying to build a community, and so are we. Let's face it, times are tough and programmers need to help programmers.''

To download the full source code and documentation of the Infragistics reference application, please visit http://www.infragistics.com/products/thinreference.asp

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