Ok, this should be a lot of fun! ComponentArt has just announced the official beginning of the 2009 Summer Silverlight Coding Competition . Starting immediately and throughout the summer (until September 22), developers can submit their Silverlight applications for evaluation by our Expert Panel and the developer community. The author(s) of the "best" application, as decided by the Expert Panel and the community, will walk away with the grand prize of $10,000 USD. Authors of the two ru...

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Shipping UI Framework 2009.1 was a lot more than a software release here at ComponentArt. In many ways, it was a re-launch of the company itself. Now that the big release is out in the wild, I thought that it would be fun to reflect on what we have done in the past as well as think about what lies ahead. A Walk Down Memory Lane A couple of days ago we went through our archive of previous websites and had a good laugh while we relived some of those moments. Here is a quick list of the key points ...

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We are excited to announce the availability of ComponentArt Web.UI for Silverlight Beta - our latest suite of controls for Rich Internet Application development. The initial release will feature eight controls, with rapid expansion of the suite planned throughout 2009. Links to live demos, beta download package, as well as detailed roadmap information are all available on our Silverlight Controls page. Admittedly, we are a little late to the Silverlight party. Other leading vendors have been off...

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The Web.UI product team has been hard at work on the next major release of ComponentArt's flagship product line. I am pleased to announce that the release of Web.UI 2008.2 is on the horizon and that it will include three new controls, a major Grid overhaul and several important new suite-wide features. Three New Controls The Web.UI suite is being expanded yet again. The following controls are being added with v2008.2: Input for ASP.NET Slider for ASP.NET ColorPicker for ASP.NET Major Grid Ov...

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We are thrilled to announce the release of ComponentArt Charting 2008.1. This product has been in the works for well over a year and it brings a number of truly important new features to the market. At this time I would like to highlight the two most significant areas of product improvement in v2008.1, and the Charting development team will follow up with additional juicy details related to the new functionality. AJAX Interactivity We think that the new view angle chooser , zooming and scrolling...

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We've been hard at work on Web.UI 2008.1 for a few months now, and I am happy to report that we are rapidly approaching the feature-complete beta milestone for the next major Web.UI release. This means that we are ready to announce what will be included in v2008.1 as well as our anticipated release dates. Web.UI 2008.1 Overview The upcoming Web.UI release will include the following major new features: New control: ComponentArt Upload for ASP.NET Extended suite-wide support for web service bi...

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Since the time we shipped our first production suite of native ASP.NET AJAX controls back in November of 2006, we've been experimenting with new ways of doing efficient incremental page updates. We felt that we had something promising on our hands with full fledged client-side controls. The ability to create high-level UI elements (menus, treeviews, grids, etc.) on the client seemed like a solid foundation to build on. Our research produced a new high-performance AJAX technique which is curr...

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Without any doubt, the upcoming Editor control is the most anticipated product ever developed by ComponentArt. Our customers have been telling us for years that they are unhappy with existing solutions on the market, and that we should make a ComponentArt-quality browser-based WYSIWYG editor. We set out to do that about a year ago, and I am happy to announce that we are approaching the first public beta release. Building a solid browser-based text editor is hard. Our research has uncovered funda...

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Now that Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 has shipped , it's a good time to talk about the next version of ASP.NET and Visual Studio. More specifically, I am happy to share some good news on how Microsoft's next major platform release will affect ComponentArt's customers. Scott Guthrie has a great post on ASP.NET AJAX in .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 . I encourage you to read the entire post, but here are some key points you should take away from it: "ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 shipped as a se...

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A little while ago it hit us that our website was almost 3 years old. It had aged well, but the polish was starting to come off, and it grew to the point where its navigation was no longer adequate. It was time for a complete re-vamp. While brainstorming the new website and its navigation structure, we quickly came to the subject of ribbon - a new user interface element introduced by Microsoft Office 2007. We felt that it worked really well in desktop applications, but at that point we had never...

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The latest incantation AxoSoft's bug tracking and project management software - OnTime 2007 - was officially released yesterday. AxoSoft is a leader in its space, offering a product that hits the sweet spot for customers looking for high-end tracking and team collaboration features found in packages such as Visual Studio Team Services, but without the complexity and implementation headaches that are typically associated with those systems. We've been using OnTime 2006 for defect & fe...

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Last night we updated the official Web.UI product roadmap . We are about 1-2 weeks off target regarding the release dates that were announced back in November. However, the good news is that the 2007.1 release will include one additional control (Dialog for ASP.NET), adding a total of three new controls: ComboBox, ToolBar, and Dialog. Adding a third control won't be the only surprise with the 2007.1 release. We are about to deliver a set of features that will take the built-in AJAX capabilit...

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The final version of ASP.NET AJAX was released today. We are very pleased to simultaneously announce the immediate availability of the full production version of ComponentArt Web.UI for ASP.NET AJAX. Taking those "beta" signs off our ASP.NET AJAX product line felt really good! Developing for various technology preview and beta builds of "Atlas" / ASP.NET AJAX has been quite an experience. It all started at the PDC 2005 conference where Microsoft showed off the first prototype...

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"Interoperability" is a term that has been used by several ASP.NET control vendors, including ComponentArt, to describe integration with ASP.NET AJAX. However, since we shipped the first public beta release of Web.UI for ASP.NET AJAX, we started using new verbiage to describe our product offering: "True ASP.NET AJAX Controls". Is this just marketing spin? Is there some technical backup for these claims? Finally, as an ASP.NET AJAX developer, why should you care? I'll try ...

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The ASP.NET team shipped the release candidate for ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 late last week. According to Scott Guthrie, "the next public release will be the final, fully supported, 1.0 product", and the final release is expected in about 4 weeks. We have been working with the ASP.NET AJAX RC build for just over a week, and I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of ComponentArt Web.UI 2006.2 SP2 (build: 2006.2.1498) which targets the ASP.NET AJAX Release Candidate. The latest build...

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