(November 20, 2002) - It has often been said, "You don't know what you've got until you lose it." As I watched a recent demonstration of Infragistics' NetAdvantage Suite, it occurred to me that you also don't often realize what you're missing until you find it. Microsoft's ASP.NET technology is absolutely brilliant right out-of-the-box... but Infragistics' NetAdvantage Suite makes it even better!

I often tell my students to think of ASP.NET as a technology that makes thin, Web-based applications seem almost as interactive as thick, desktop clients. Infragistics' NetAdvantage Suite takes this capability to its logical conclusion and allows Web-based applications to behave even more like traditional desktop clients. In fact, versions of these components are included for use on the desktop - COM or .NET - for the added benefit of a consistent programming model across your entire enterprise.

The first, possibly most impressive, component that all three of these platforms share in common is an advanced Grid control. Grids represent an area with which many ASP.NET developers are already unhappy, owing to the rather difficult process through which one must go in order to use them properly. Fortunately, NetAdvantage uses a much improved, much simpler programming model that is sure to have developers cheering as they are finally able to leverage Grid functionality on the desktop or in their Web pages without going insane. Also, the Grid's functionality is markedly superior to that offered by "vanilla" ASP.NET - even to the point of supporting nested table views for hierarchical data.

So-called "Outlook-style" on-demand sorting is just one of the impressive features supported by many of the components within the NetAdvantage suite. Under this mode of operation, a user looking at a table of information can arbitrarily decide to drag-and-drop columns on-and-off of the chart in various orders. This allows users to completely customize the ways in which they view data, with almost no additional coding effort required by the developer!

This behavior works every bit as well under most Web browsers as it does within the confines of a purely desktop-based client application. The reason for this is that all of Infragistics' ASP.NET components generate pure, standards-compliant DHTML. In the truest spirit of ASP.NET, these components can also sense the level of whatever browser is making a connection and adapt their behaviors accordingly. The more obsolete the browser (Netscape 4 or Internet Explorer 4, for example), the more round-trips will be required in order to support them - but this is all you should ever need to worry about browser compatibility!

Infragistics has a very simple, fair pricing model for their NetAdvantage product. The first option, priced at just $495 gives you all of the components in the suite - COM, .NET, and ASP.NET. For just $200 more, you can get the source code for the .NET and ASP.NET components along with Subscription Service that provides automatic notification of and rights to all major upgrades and minor updates for the period of one year. If your application is mission-critical and you require guarantees on support incident turnaround times, then Infragistics also offers an Enterprise Edition of their component suite that is very reasonably priced at $995. Thankfully, all prices are per developer, with no royalties required on whatever products you might build and distribute!

For more information, see http://www.infragistics.com/products/netadvantage_portal.asp