Syncfusion Essential Studio 4.3

This is an all-in-one package from Syncfusion that provides different types

of components to use on your application's UI. There are two different

editions of the Studio available, one for Windows Forms and the other for

ASP.NET, downloaded/purchased separately. In addition, there are also individual

packages that comprise of subsets of these components-for example, just all

the HTML related components are available as the 'Essential HTMLUI' product.

We tried out various components in the Essential Studio package and they were

easy and mostly intuitive to use. We say mostly intuitive because with a couple

of them, it is not immediately apparent how to go further without actually

reading the documentation. Some components have been traditionally tough to code

for, and usually require a lot of setup, tear-down and usage code to be put in

before they work properly; for instance: grids and wizards. These are very easy

to use with the Essential toolkit, requiring very less coding.

Price: $995 (Windows Forms Edition) Meant For: .NET developers Key Specs: Package of 9 differentcomponents Pros: Easy to design and script Cons: You need to read document-ation for some of them, high price Contact: Syncfusion Inc, Morrisville, USA  brandonw@syncfusion.com www.syncfusion.com RQS# E43 or SMS Buy 131143 to 6677

Let's take up the wizard and see how this is easier to do with the

Essential component. To get started, add a new form designer to your project and

drag the 'WizardControl' component onto it. What you see in front of you

here is similar to an onion-skinned layout graphics/video that editors use to

create animations and movies. Create a page of the wizard, select 'Add page'

to append a new page to the sequence, work with that and so on. This is no doubt

easy to do, but we wish there was an easier way to know what to do, like a

dialog where we could add pages or know how many and what pages there are

quickly.

Each control has a number of useful events that let you validate what's on

screen and control where the execution proceeds. These events typically include:

(the standard) Validate event; another one to tell you that execution is about

to proceed, one to intimate that execution has continued; and an event that

tells you that the next stage has been reached. The names of these events change

as per the control being evented.

There are two advantages in using the Studio edition compared to the

individual components. An immediate one being the price advantage, especially

when you're using just one platform (Windows Forms or ASP.NET). The source

code for the toolkit is also available if you so need it, but this is a priced

purchase. A large collection of ready to use samples is also provided with the

package. You can use this to follow the documentation as well as learn how to

use various components.

Syncfusion provides lots of controls for use with .NET apps, to create a rich UI with very less code compared to similar packages

Bottom Line: A very good collection of .NET components, if you don't

mind the price.

Sujay V Sarma