Expanding the .NET Framework
The death of component and class library vendors is greatly exaggerated.
by Brian Noyes

VSLive! SF, Day 3, February 14, 2002 — One of the questions and criticisms of the .NET Framework Class Library (FCL) that often came up through the Beta cycle was that Microsoft was being monopolistic by creating the FCL because it was so rich it was going to put third-party component and class library vendors out of business. Well, the vendors have risen to the challenge and have already proved this not only to be an empty accusation, but are showing that the FCL allows them to enhance and ship their products more quickly, too.

The FCL contains a great deal of functionality and capability, factored into a hierarchically organized class library consisting of more than 7,000 classes. These classes let you easily do everything from manipulating XML to creating Web applications and services, to loading, displaying, and manipulating images, to a host of other things. However, for certain specialized, repetitive tasks and vertical markets, there are still a lot of things that can be provided to speed the time to market for products in that arena.

This is where the component and class library vendors are stepping in and rapidly expanding what you can create easily with .NET. A large number of vendors have already been advertising products for .NET and many more are making announcements and showing their results at VSLive! this week. Vendors such as ComponentOne, Dundas, and Infragistics have released component libraries for .NET that continue and extend their existing product lines. Many of these vendors have existing products available as ActiveX controls for legacy applications. Now you can quickly integrate these capabilities into your .NET applications.

If you already have an existing investment in these products, and have people with expertise in using their APIs for integration and extension, you can leverage that knowledge by getting the corresponding .NET components as you move your products into the .NET arena. If you are getting started with new applications, these components still give you a significant improvement in time to market, by providing specialized behaviors and appearance to the built-in .NET components and classes, much faster than you could create these things yourself. In the VB6 and VC6 arena, you really needed libraries or components like these to provide even fairly simple tabular or tree interfaces in a time-effective manner. Now you can get those things from the .NET FCL pretty quickly, without third-party support.

If you want to get fancier—combo boxes, custom controls in cells, custom behavior and events in grids, for example—you have to wire up a lot of stuff yourself with the .NET FCL. This is a huge improvement over what you had in VB6 or VC6, but you still have some code to write. Products such as Infragistics' UltraWinSuite give you these things and many more out of the box. UltraWinSuite includes components for specialized grids, trees, toolbars, charting, and scheduling capabilities. The company also offers the UltraWebSuite, which lets you quickly provide trees, menus, toolbars, grids, and charting capabilities in your Web pages. Infragistics was able to leverage off the WinForms and Web Forms classes in the .NET FCL to provide these capabilities faster and richer than was possible with ActiveX.

For another segment of the developer community, vendors such as Lead Technologies, Autodesk, and Groove Networks are introducing specialized components for vertical markets. Autodesk provides the ability to integrate rich GIS application capabilities into custom-built .NET applications with minimal effort. Lead Technologies provides powerful image processing and display capabilities for .NET applications in the scientific, medical, and multimedia fields. Groove Networks is providing business collaboration components that allow you to quickly develop specialized collaborative tools for your business or customers.

The list goes on and on. The bottom line is that these vendors are putting more capability into the hands of developers to speed your time to market and allow you to put more capability into the hands of your customers. They are exploiting the integration capabilities of the VS.NET IDE so the way you create and customize their components makes it feel like they're part of the FCL itself. The vendors themselves have been able to capitalize on the productivity boosts provided by the .NET Framework, and that gets passed along to you by making it easier for you to build and deploy your .NET solutions immediately.