Reviews
Review: ASPxNavigation Suite
- By Mike Gunderloy
- April 30, 2004
ASPxNavigation Suite 1.1
$149.99
Developer Express
Las Vegas, Nevada
(702) 262-0609
www.devexpress.com
This suite offers a pair of controls, ASPxMenu and ASPxNavBar, together
with the full C# source code for both. The controls combine design-time
support in VS .NET with client-side scripting that supports a good
subset of major browsers (IE 4+, Netscape 4+, and Mozilla).
The ASPxMenu control lets you produce menu sections for site navigation
with various rollover effects. Menus can be static, or they can pop up
when you point at a graphic. You can have submenus that fly out as well.
If you'd rather, you can just have straight dropdown menus. Of course,
you can adjust things like layout and colors to suit your needs. You
also get a templating system that makes for fast and flexible
formatting.
The ASPxNavBar lets you create groups of links (or other things, for
that matter), surrounded by boxes. The end user can expand, contract, or
rearrange the groups right in the browser. It's all very reminiscent of
the XP-style sidebars where groups of things open and shut. The groups
and items are also available programmatically, so you can change their
contents on the fly.
These controls are quite snappy in the browser, and don't appear to
vastly increase page size. If you want to play around with the controls,
there are live demos linked from the product's home page, or you can
download a trial version.
About the Author
Mike Gunderloy has been developing software for a quarter-century now, and writing about it for nearly as long. He walked away from a .NET development career in 2006 and has been a happy Rails user ever since. Mike blogs at A Fresh Cup.