This is the second part of a three-part series that will cover what is contained in the NetAdvantage For .NET Suite. The three products are NetAdvantage for ASP.NET, NetAdvantage for Windows Forms, and NetAdvantage AppStylist. You can go online to explore more about the products in this suite. The goal of this series it to define what each product does and what it can do for you.

Infragistics over the years has positioned itself as a leader in the development of the presentation layer technologies. By creating high quality, reusable presentation layer tools for ASP.NET, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Tablet PC, and Java Environments, they are able to provide their customers with the ability to accelerate the development process by reducing development time.

The NetAdvantage For .NET Suite is compatible with Visual Studio 2008, and Visual Studio 2005. It works with Microsoft Windows XP and Vista. Infragistics products are subscription-based which gives you updates and upgrades for the period of the license; usually one year. So when you see the terminology "2008 Volume 1", this means it is the first release for this release of the product for that year. The license is also developer based which means that the developer can install it on more than one machine, but they are the only one who has the right to use the license.

So what is NetAdvantage For ASP.NET? It is a toolkit for creating ASP.NET Web-based applications. It contains an extensive set of over 35 visual and non-visual controls including AJAX grids, charts, toolbars, menus, listbars, trees, tabs, and much more.

The NetAdvantage For ASP.NET is a complete toolset for building the presentation layer of your ASP.NET applications. The ASP.NET Controls and components are built on server-side and client-side architectural frameworks. They communicate and interact using JavaScript objects and XML. The server-side is designed to operate within the ASP.NET Framework and much of its functionality is derived from classes, structures, and events in the framework. The client-side objects are implemented as JavaScript functions on the pages that are invoked at the time that each event occurs.

So what is new with NetAdvantage For ASP.NET?

• Full Support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – is new in NetAdvantage For ASP.NET. Included is support for the integrated development environment (IDE), and all .NET controls and components have been tested within this new environment.

• Aikido Framework – is the first release of Infragistics new Web User Framework. It is an architecture built into NetAdvantage For ASP.NET that supports the creation of lightweight, cross-browser, XHTML and CSS-based AJAX controls. Currently based on the Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX extensions 1.0 and ASP.NET 2.0, it is meant to remain aligned with the new ASP.NET 3.5 programming paradigms as they arise. The goals for this framework are to provide high-performance, standards compliance, major browser support, and the ability to make the object model simpler to understand and employ.