NetAdvantage 2007 Volume 2 Beta
The next release of NetAdvantage has quite the lineup of functionality and features for you to take advantage of. The goal of this release was to solve more business application development problems and in fact save you a lot of time. As for this release, to be honest, I don’t even know what piece of functionality to talk about first because we’ve got a lot of things stuffed into this release. Here’s a sampling of what we did…
GAUGE
Let’s start with the long expected Gauge. It’s got both digital gauges and radial gauges and a whole lot of styles for you to choose from. This as many of you have beta tested is no small control. It’s got a lot of power to it.
PDF/XPS DOCUMENT EXPORTING
This one has been a long time coming and is finally hitting the market. You can now export our WinGrid to PDF…but wait…there’s more. The document exporting api’s are so robust that you can drive the creation of PDF/XPS documents in any way you like. Since there is no visual design surface on the API’s, I’ll stop short of calling them reporting, but that being said you can use them to create reports if you’re so inclined and unflinching at jumping into the code.
DESKTOP ALERT
The WinDesktopAlert mimics both Outlook and Live Messenger granting you the capability to notify your users on some piece of information by a simple method call.
EXCEL EXPORT ENHANCEMENTS
Headlining with three new controls, I normally wouldn’t jump into any enhancements to other existing controls, but we did do a lot of work on the Excel Exporting Engine. One piece of functionality in these enhancements that I felt obligated to mention was the capability to import from Excel into into our Excel object model. *Note, I did not say directly into our grid, b/c Excel is a cell-based structure and since our grid is column/row based we didn’t want to make any assumptions about what the data might look like. That being said…I did write a simple sample that allows you to export to Excel then call a method (and I only looked at a flat data structure), build a datasource, and essentially import the Excel data back into the grid. I plan on writing a blog post on that sample in the near future!
CALL TO ACTION
If you’re a subscriber, download the beta! If you’re not...what are you waiting for…become a subscriber and download the beta! You can find the bits here.