Applying ComponentOne To .Net Data

While there are many vendors to choose from, most small component vendors only offer partial business solutions or superficial algorithms with fancy graphics. Pittsburgh-based ComponentOne, however, stands above most of these vendors by offering a wide variety of components for every tier of the .Net and Win32 application stack.

Its new ComponentOne Studio Enterprise suite consists of database grids, charts, data access methods and reporting. These components cover .Net WinForms, WebForms for ASP.Net, mobile devices and ActiveX controls for Visual Basic 6 applications. For .Net WinForms, ComponentOne offers components for data grids, charts, user interfaces and file format generations such as PDFs, Excel files and even simple Flash animation.

ComponentOne's .Net grid controlsVSFlexGrid and TrueDBGridare useful for data-intensive applications. VSFlexGrid helps organize data in tabular form with drag-and-drop capabilities, aggregate data, merge cells and add totals. These grids provide expanded views of columns and rows, and then can generate other grids from the expanded views. All of the interconnected grids can be created dynamically in code.

Studio's chart components support 2-D and 3-D displays, zooming and panning. Charts can be designed quite easily, allowing developers to quickly create visual elements for business applications. ComponentOne arrives with reporting tools that compete with Visual Studio's Crystal Reports. The report Designer provides a wizard to help developers generate report sections and connect data fields graphically. The Designer also can import Microsoft Access reports.

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ComponentOne's PDF component is similar to working with .Net's graphics class, so developers can design and generate PDF files using graphical elements. The PDF API provides a variety of useful features such as adding internal hyperlinks, bookmarks, mixed page sizes and password protection to files.

By wrapping WinForms, ComponentOne makes its .Net reporting and charting components available for Web development. Studio also arrives with user interfaces for .Net 2.0 Web menus and Web toolbars.

In addition to WinForms and WebForms, ComponentOne comes with components for the Microsoft Compact Framework. However, these components only provide data views on Windows CE. In addition to .Net components, the company sells components for Borland's C# Builder and Delphi.

ComponentOne also sells the Doc-To-Help tool, which helps generate documentation by analyzing .Net assemblies. Doc-To-Help outputs documents in Microsoft Word for technical writers software documentation.

ComponentOne has maintained a consistent object model between .Net 1.x and .Net 2.0 for Studio. Therefore, developers do not have to make changes to their code when changing versions of the .Net framework. However, new features released for the .Net 2.0 Studio version are not backward-compatible.

As far as support for the channel, the company takes a minimalist approach. The single-tier channel program is solely aimed at moving the product through distribution via resellers. Typically, the company's products will be used directly by developers and are not geared for value-added resale. ComponentOne offers support options for their partners, along with demo and beta access to products.