One of the big advantages of developing ASP.Net 2.0 Web sites with Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Web Developer Express is that you can accomplish a great deal in design mode by dragging, dropping, and configuring components before manipulating the components programmatically. Microsoft supplies dozens of controls in its Standard and Data toolboxes; it also allows developers to add controls to the Visual Studio toolbox.
When those controls aren’t enough, developers can expand their selection third-party offerings. Two of the most prominent control collections for ASP.Net 2.0 are Infragistics NetAdvantage for ASP.Net and telerik r.a.d.controls for ASP.Net. Each includes about 30 controls and supports AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).
[Screencasts: Infragistics, telerik]
I found both of these control sets to be potentially invaluable for Web developers. Both deliver excellent grid controls, rich edit controls, and a useful assortment of user input controls. Most of the other features balance out, with a few exceptions. Among them, Infragistics offers a significantly more capable chart control, as well as somewhat better documentation.
Taking control
Both NetAdvantage and r.a.d.controls add significant capabilities to Visual Studio 2005 that will allow developers to be more productive. Many of their controls are directly comparable with each other; a few are unique.
Consider the simple but extremely common problem of getting a number in a specific range from the user. Using standard Microsoft controls, you would add a TextBox to your Web form along with a RangeValidator. With NetAdvantage controls, you add a WebNumericEdit control to your Web form, set its DataMode, MinValue, and MaxValue properties, and choose a design preset to match the desired look and feel; this control returns the validated number in the correct type of variable, which, compared with the standard Microsoft controls, can save quite a bit of time programming validators.
| Test Center Scorecard | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |  |  |  |  |  | |
| 30% | 30% | 15% | 15% | 10% | ||
| NetAdvantage for ASP.NET 2006 Volume 2 | 9 | 8 | 9 | 8 | 8 |
8.5
Very Good
|
| 30% | 30% | 15% | 15% | 10% | ||
| Telerik r.a.d.controls for ASP.NET Q2 2006 | 9 | 8 | 8 | 8 | 8 |
8.3
Very Good
|
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