NetAdvantage for ASP.NET Volume 7.2 Beta released

The next beta release of NetAdvantage for ASP.NET 7.2 is available to subscribers now, and this release continues the products long tradition of adding value in each release.

Gauge
Let’s start with the long expected Gauge.  It’s got digital gauges, radial gauges and numeric display gauges and, as many of you who have beta tested it know, this is no small control.  It’s got a lot of power to it.

If you tried out the beta version, first of all, thanks a bunch for helping us make the product even better!  Second, the release version now includes a great Gauge designer and over 100 presets so that you can you to get gauges in your application quickly and easily.

Search Engine Rendering Enhancements

As someone in our company said, its a "Google Web", so to better help you get your sites index by Google and the other search engines out there we added new search engine rendering capabilities to the WebGrid, WebTree and WebMenu.  When these controls determine that a search engine is making the request, they will automatically alter their output to make it easy for a search engine to index and follow and links in the them.

Localization

We added additional localization support to the WebSchedule controls and to the WebHtmlEditor making it easier for you to give your users a complete localized experience using your application.

WebGrid

Finally we added two enhancements to the WebGrid giving you even more control over its behavior.   First we added the ability for you to configure the grid to Group data in a  case-insensitive manner, so that if your state column includes the value 'nj' and 'NJ', grouping that column will result in both of those values being the same group.  Second we added the ability to let you set the visibility of each Grid columns FilterImage.  This is great if you have a default filter that you want to add to your grid, but don't want to let your end users change it.

Whats next?

What do we have planned next?  Well, beyond the normal product enhancements that we have scheduled, we have been hard at work on two major projects.  First we all know that Visual Studio 2008 is on its way, so are working with Microsoft to make sure that all of our controls are compatible with the upcoming Visual Studio 2008 release.  Second we are working on a whole new ASP.NET control framework and set of controls we call Aikido.  Aikido based controls will be the lightest, fastest and easiest to use ASP.NET controls we have ever created, and are being built natively on the ASP.NET 2.0 + ASP.NET AJAX Extensions 1.0 platform, meaning that they will also include seamless AJAX integration.  Rest assured that the Aikido controls will be part of NetAdvantage for ASP.NET and NetAdvantage for .NET.

Finally, we will continue to explore and develop products for emerging technologies to be able to offer an array of products on every platform that are, and will be, important to developers which is why we currently offer NetAdvantage for Windows Forms, ASP.NET, WPF and JSF and are working on Silverlight. We do this by growing our company, to develop multiple products at the same time, not by choosing one platform over another.

If you’re a subscriber, download the beta and give us some feedback in the forums.  If you’re not...what are you waiting for…become a subscriber and download the beta!  You can find the bits here.