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 in ComponentArt's history, with website screenshots:

		February 28, 2002 - The Beginning ASP.NET Menu launched by CYBERAKT INC. Throughout the summer of 2001 we were evaluating Microsoft’s new .NET Framework, which was in Beta 2 at the time. We were very impressed by ASP.NET and thought that it could use a good menu control. Our first software component product - ASP.NET Menu – was released at the same time as ASP.NET itself. It quickly became the most downloaded control on the official ASP.NET website and sales started pouring in! Without a doubt, ASP.NET Menu was the big catalyst that enabled our growth.
		March 28, 2003 - Rich Content Rotator Proceeding with the rich DHTML control theme, we released our next product: Rich Content Rotator for ASP.NET (we affectionately refer to that control as "Rotato" here at the office). Rotato was less than a blockbuster product for us: it wasn't anywhere near as popular as ASP.NET Menu. Also notice that it took us more than a year to release the second component. In any case, we learnt that you can't win them all and started working hard on our next release.
		May 14, 2004 - ComponentArt 1.0 This release marked the end of the "CYBERAKT" era. We changed the company name to ComponentArt and went through an elaborate rebranding exercise. We wanted a fresh new look that would be distinctive in the marketplace. Market reaction was overwhelmingly positive and we received numerous awards for our print ads in the coming years. This release also marked the introduction of our flagship Web.UI for ASP.NET product line, with TreeView and Snap controls added to the mix for a total of four components!
		September 9, 2005 - ComponentArt - AJAX Edition Skipping a few smaller releases, it was Web.UI 3.0 that marked the next major step in our offering. We implemented client-side rendering across the entire Web.UI suite, released our super-popular Grid for ASP.NET control and introduced the first generic AJAX container control for ASP.NET: ComponentArt CallBack (code named "AjaxBox"). This control was a major innovation. Notice that we released it well over a year before Microsoft's UpdatePanel control and quite a bit before any other competing products. (By the way, CallBack and UpdatePanel have different architectures and are complementary products. More info on that is available here).
		December 21, 2005 - Charting Redefined End of 2005 was when we revealed our next major achievement: Charting for .NET. We had been working on that product for 2 years prior to its release and we were very proud of our own 3D rendering engine. The rendering quality of our charts was impressive enough for the most established charting vendor to approach me at a tradeshow and ask: "Hey, who wrote your rendering engine?" I replied with a smile: "My dad." But that's another blog post.
		November 21, 2006 - The First True "Atlas" Controls We had been working closely with the ASP.NET AJAX (code named "Atlas") team for many months prior to shipping Web.UI for ASP.NET AJAX. Our release was parallel with the "Atlas" release itself and generated a great deal of buzz in the industry, including a mention on Scott Guthrie's blog. Business-wise, this product was also a blockbuster for us. The strategy of putting so much effort into supporting an upcoming MS framework and developing against its alpha bits was a risky one. It took some effort to convince the management team, but it really paid off in the end.
		May 1, 2007 - The Ribbon Nav The May 1st release marked a website redesign and the introduction of ribbon-based navigation. Implementing non-standard UI elements for main navigation was another risky move. We had to make sure that it was perfectly executed, otherwise the website would be rendered useless (additional thoughts on that exercise are available here). We worked long and hard on the new site and in my opinion once again ended up with something unique and well executed.

ComponentArt 2009.1

Even though we've done some noteworthy things in the past, our latest release is undoubtedly our biggest achievement. We have grown our product offering by an order of magnitude, completely redesigned the website and introduced a new brand: ComponentArt UI Framework for .NET.

I believe that this product release is significant beyond the fact that we have shipped a number of new components. We are introducing a powerful new paradigm with UI-centric web services and the ability to share code between AJAX and Silverlight applications. Most web developers on Microsoft's platform today are somewhere between building vanilla ASP.NET apps and full Silverlight adoption. Our SOA.UI framework was designed to help bridge that gap as well as offer value to those who are already there (you can save quite a few lines of code even if you are doing Silverlight development exclusively). A lot more on that later.

The new website is something we are particularly proud of. We have decided to take another fresh (although not as radical) approach to navigation. I think that the new "mega menu" works quite well. However, our customers always have the final say regarding these things, so please let us know how we did.

ComponentArt v.Next

You won't be surprised to hear that we are already working on the next release. As outlined in our new product roadmap, our plan is to expand our existing product lines as well as introduce a new Win.UI for WPF control suite by the end of the year. We are also working on additional website upgrades: the knowledge base and community sections will see major overhauls in the near future.

We will always continue to think about creative ways to add value to the platform and best serve our customers.