News

Infragistics Adds Cross-Platform Mobile App Functionality

• By David Ramel
• October 16, 2014

Infragistics Inc., known for its UI component development tools targeting the Microsoft .NET Framework, yesterday updated its developer toolkit with new functionality including increased support for building cross-platform mobile apps.

Thanks to a recent partnership with cross-platform specialist Xamarin Inc., developers can now use the new Infragistics Ultimate 14.2 release to target iOS, Android and Windows Phone with one shared code base written in C# and XAML.

The cross-platform coding takes place in the new Infragistics Xamarin.Forms product, which lets developers use native controls with the Xamarin tooling in Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE. Infragistics had supported building native apps previously with separate control sets written in Objective-C and Java for iOS and Android platforms, respectively.

"There are a ton of reasons why this is so exciting, but from a pure cost perspective, using the technology from Infragistics and Xamarin, a company does not need to invest in the training and time loss of learning a new platform -- using current C# and XAML skillsets native apps can be churned out in no time compared to building a native experience from scratch on each major mobile platform," said company exec Jason Beres in a blog post.

The UI component specialist listed the following features in Xamarin.Forms:

• Interactive charting, including common series like category, stacked, polar, radial and scatter, with trend lines, financial indicators, interactions and animations.
• Additional business data visualizations like pie charts, gauges and bullet graphs.
• Fully virtualized, data-bound, high-performance data grid with pin-able columns, carousel views, selection events and customizable layouts.

Ultimate 14.2 also includes a new WYSIWYG Web-based Page Designer that leverages HTML5 and jQuery controls to build modern line-of-business Web apps and new data visualization and charting controls for building enterprise applications with Windows Forms.

Other new features were added to the company's Ignite and ASP.NET tooling. Additionally, the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) functionality has been enhanced, along with the Indigo Studio design tool.

"Great apps happen by design, whether you are building Web, mobile or desktop apps, and this starts with Indigo Studio, our interactive prototyping tool," Beres said in a statement. "What makes it really awesome is that Indigo Studio can generate standards-based HTML5 and JavaScript with our Ignite UI controls, which can be further refined by our newly released WYSIWYG Page Designer for the Web. And if you are building rich client Windows Forms or XAML apps, use one of our best-practices pre-built Office-inspired templates to kick-start your next project. Our goal is to minimize the start-up for your great app with 14.2."

Infragistics said code samples are available online for Ultimate 14.2, which costs $1,995 per developer and is available for a free trial.