DevExpress announced at TechEd 2008 that it will release its upcoming AgDataGrid for Silverlight free of charge to the developer community. The DevExpress Grid for Silverlight has been engineered to fully exploit the power and flexibility of Microsoft's Silverlight platform and will ship with advanced data visualization and data shaping features...from column grouping and sorting, to summary calculations against multiple columns.
"Silverlight represents an exciting new development option for software developers and DevExpress is committed to delivering feature-complete presentation components for this next generation platform." said Julian M Bucknall, CTO of Developer Express Inc. "Over the coming months, DevExpress will release numerous controls for Silverlight to help developers deliver compelling solutions and address business needs in an elegant and effective manner."
The AgDataGrid for Silverlight Community Preview will be released in the coming weeks and once released, it will be available for download from http://devexpress.com free of charge and can be incorporated into any Silverlight application without licensing or royalty fees.
As the release of Silverlight draws near, DevExpress has invested the engineering resources needed to deliver a feature-rich grid control for Silverlight. Not just a "preview" of what is possible with Silverlight, the AgDataGrid Suite was developed to fully exploit the power and flexibility of the platform and will ship with the following features:
- Data Grouping against multiple Silverlight Grid columns
- Data Sorting against multiple Silverlight Grid columns
- Comprehensive Summary Computation support against multiple Silverlight Grid columns
- Column Movement
- Column Resizing
- Column Auto-Width
- Row Editing
- Row Preview (with animation)
- Template Support (for cell content, cell editing, row preview and headers)
- Auto Height Support for cells, headers, and totals.
- Virtual StackPanel Row Container (simply means we are able to handle an unlimited number of rows)
- Focused Row and Focused Cell
- Multi-Row Selection
- Cell Text Wrapping
- Vertical/Horizontal Lines
- Multiple column types/editors
Beyond the features we’ve listed above, the AgDataGrid will ship with the following capabilities:
- Smart UI Element Management
AgDataGrid implements a smart loading and re-organization of the grid's inner UI elements to provide smaller control load times and faster data operations.
- Designed for Future Performance Enhancements
Silverlight is all about client-side technology...But if client/server interaction will be implemented in future versions, our grid is ready to delegate data processing to the server side and thus boost application performance.
- Higher-Level abstractions
With our unique measurement routines you don't have to think in terms of pixels - which you do with the standard Silverlight grid. Just like other advanced controls for older platforms, you simply specify styles and fonts and all element sizes are automatically modified.
- Full Animation Support
It's hard to imagine any Silverlight control without compelling animation effects. Though the standard Microsoft Silverlight grid control's architecture doesn't support them, AgDataGrid fully supports animations for group row expansion, preview row display and other operations.