New Stuff
Resources for Your Developer Toolbox
Marnie Hutcheson
Contents
Stunning ASP.NET Web Sites
Create Help Files Inside Visual Studio .NET
Bridging the World of Java/J2EE and .NET
Include Interactive Diagrams in Your UI
A Fast Data Grid Control
Add Custom Functions to Your PDF Files
The Bookshelf
Stunning ASP.NET Web Sites
r.a.d.controls by telerik gives you an impressive set of great looking interface components, Visual Studio® .NET design-time support, cross-browser compatibility, keyboard support, and data binding.
The first thing that struck me when I went through the demos for this toolset was how professional the Web pages created with these controls can look. This new release includes major version updates of the r.a.d.treeview, r.a.d.chart, and r.a.d.panelbar components, as well as a minor update of r.a.d.spell.
The scrolling news box and the dynamic charts are cool, but I was most impressed by the tree, panel, menu, and editor controls. The r.a.d.chart component gives you five new chart types and supports image maps and postback events so your users can drill down in your charts.
The r.a.d.treeview component has a client-side load on demand mechanism that lets you populate child nodes on demand without a full page postback to the server. There is also a new node sorting feature and the ability to bind the treeview component to data sources.
Forget "graphically challenged" and don't worry about what a multiple-line menu option is going to do to your menu layouts. The r.a.d.menu control takes care of those details for you. You just pick the style and skin you want (for example, Microsoft® Windows® or Outlook®) and presto—you get great looking menus that you can drag and drop into your ASP.NET project. r.a.d.menu generates code that can be crawled and indexed by search engines with the menu rendering a list of hyperlinks even when JavaScript is disabled or not installed.
The r.a.d.editor component looks and works just like Microsoft Word, so there is no scare factor for office folks who are tasked with entering information in your application or updating their own Web sites. They can paste or type in their content, spell check it, strip out proprietary formatting, and submit it as RTF or HTML. In addition, the r.a.d.editor supports localization and is compliant with Section "508" Accessibility standards.
You get a large set of configuration options for the r.a.d.editor that let you control things like who can edit what, where content is going to be saved, what content is going to be saved as, and so on. The r.a.d.controls use a role-based security model that you configure.
The r.a.d.designer component lets you set up your own page layouts called content templates. You specify what goes in each area—the menu in the left border, the top banner and page footers, and content areas. When you start a new page, you just pick the layout you want to use and the page is built with all your components and graphics already in place. You just tweak, edit, or add what you need to the template to finish your new page.
Price: $799 per single-user license.
Create Help Files Inside Visual Studio .NET
Help Publisher for Visual Studio 2003 by Indigoware gives you all the necessary project templates, editors, import wizards, and content tools to create, compile, and preview help files from inside Visual Studio .NET. In fact, you can compile your help files as part of your application build.
Help Publisher gives you new templates to create both HTML Help 1.x and Microsoft Help 2.0 format help files for your applications. You can convert existing content into HTML help files and you can publish your help topics to Word. Help Publisher for FrontPage® and Dreamweaver interoperate with the new Help Publisher for Visual Studio so you can import existing help content from HTML Help Workshop projects or FrontPage and Dreamweaver.
Help Publisher also gives you tools that allow you to link topic pages to Context IDs, simplifying the task of adding context-sensitive Help to applications created in Visual C++®, Visual Basic® .NET, and Visual C#® .NET.
Price:$99 per single-user license.
Bridging the World of Java/J2EE and .NET
When you use J-Integra for .NET by Intrinsyc your .NET software can access existing Java/J2EE applications as though they were actually .NET-based applications. It is fully bidirectional, so your Java/J2EE software can also access .NET components as though they were written with Java.
The J-Integra for .NET plug-in for Visual Studio .NET lets you incorporate J-Integra for .NET into your client applications from inside the Visual Studio .NET environment. It provides all the functionality necessary to create a working client, including generating .NET proxies for Java classes, and generating a .NET Remoting configuration file that requires no manual editing.
J-Integra supports the use of C++, Visual Basic .NET, C#, and other .NET-based languages with standard Java objects. You can use Microsoft .NET Remoting from Java (fast binary format, HTTP/TCP channels), which means that you can do things such as pass objects by reference. It has support for events and transparently maps .NET Collections to and from Java collections.
If you are using Microsoft technology for client software applications and Java technologies for back-end systems, J-Integra will let you continue to grow both technologies without having to retrain staff or rewrite existing components.
Price: $1,199 per end-user J2EE license.
Include Interactive Diagrams in Your UI
If you need to write .NET-based applications with interactive graphical diagrams in the interface, then GoDiagram by NorthWoods can save you tons of effort. GoDiagram makes it easy to build applications where users can see and manipulate graphs of nodes connected by links.
GoDiagram supports multiple styles of links and nodes, automatic layout, multiple document layers, and subgraphs. In addition, it gives you the ability to include dials and gauges within your graphical diagrams.
When you drop the GoDiagram component onto a Windows Form you can use its default behaviors, such as clipboard, zoom, scroll, selection and multiple selections, and drag and drop between applications, to build graphical applications quickly. You can customize GoDiagrams just by setting properties on views, documents, and objects, or by providing event handlers for the controls.
Free evaluation kits are available for each flavor of GoDiagram, including the basic controls, the AutoLayout option, and user guides.
Price: $199 and up per single-user license.
A Fast Data Grid Control
FlyGrid.Net 1.0 by 9Rays.Net is a data grid control for Windows Forms that features Shift/Ctrl cell block selection, a split view capability so users can split the grid into several horizontal and vertical split views and resize them, full support of RightToLeft languages, and numerous drag and drop options. FlyGrid .NET 1.0 supports unlimited levels of nested grids within each row to display master/detail views or hierarchical data from several data sources. It works in bound, unbound, and virtual modes and it can mix these modes. You can group and sort data on several columns. You can also customize summaries and filters at run time.
Price: $179.95 and up.
Add Custom Functions to Your PDF Files
AcroButtons Version 2.0 by WindJack Solutions Inc. lets you create, manage, and embed custom toolbar buttons in your PDF documents. These buttons travel with your document. They show up as custom toolbar buttons (with the style and image of your choice) when someone opens your PDF file in Acrobat and the free Acrobat Reader.
No matter how the document is zoomed and scrolled, your buttons will always be visible on the toolbar. You can place Submit, Navigate, Search, and Help buttons (and even your company logo with a link to your Web site) on the toolbar where they will always be visible.
Toolbar buttons created with AcroButtons are built entirely with Acrobat JavaScript. Once you build them, they are independent of the AcroButtons tool. They can be used in every Acrobat product (6.0 or greater) that executes JavaScript. You build it once, use it everywhere, and distribute it to anyone.
This release includes icon images and button actions to help you get started. The Image Prep Tool helps you create the best button from images you select or import with cropping, masking, scaling, and automatic sizing features. You can import button icons from various image formats, and you can create your own button actions from scratch, or by customizing the predefined button actions that come with the product.
Price: $99 per single-user license.
The Bookshelf
Any book that makes it to a fourth edition is doing something good for its readers. Jesse Liberty, the author of Programming C#, 4th Edition (O'Reilly, 2005), says "C# builds on the lessons learned from C (high performance), C++ (object-oriented structure), Java (garbage collection, high security), and Visual Basic (rapid development) to create a new language ideally suited for developing component-based, n-tier distributed Web applications."
The book begins with a quick but thorough tour of C# language syntax and introduces the keywords, concepts, and details that make C# and .NET an effective environment for building desktop and Web applications. Then, the author takes you into the code and shows you how to use C# to write typical Web and Windows applications using, ASP.NET, Windows Forms, and ADO.NET.
He also explains how to build standards-based Web services, how to manage deployment with assemblies, work with metadata, and more.
Price: $44.95, 644 pages.
All prices were confirmed at press time and are subject to change.
Send your New Stuff to newstuff@microsoft.com.
Marnie Hutcheson is president of Internet Development Associates (Ideva), a firm in Ocala, Florida, that specializes in Internet and intranet Web application design and development. She has published technical papers and books on various computing topics. You can reach her at marnie@ideva.com.