ComponentOne strikes gold

June has been a heady month for Visual Studio component developer ComponentOne. At TechEd, the company walked away from the annual Visual Studio magazine awards ceremony with four Reader's Choice Awards and four Merit Awards. At the end of the show, ComponentOne Studio was awarded a Best of TechEd 2006 award.

Obviously, a lot of different industry watchers (and plenty of paying customers) find a lot to like about this company's offerings.

Perhaps that because ComponentOne Studio Enterprise includes a big, powerful toolset for the Visual Studio 2005 environment. It includes as complete a collection of drag-and-drop add-ins as anything I've looked at lately myself. You'll find across-the-board support for .NET 2.0 (and nearly universal support for .NET 1.0 and 1.1 as well), including a data extender for ADO.NET, database grids, reporting tools, barcode handling, PDF and ZIPfile support and a whole lot more. You'll also find numerous components to support print previews, charting and graphing, tree viewers, menus, and toolbars galore, along with tabbing mechanisms, input editors, and all kinds of other stuff. New WebGrid and WebTreeView components even offer Ajax support for those building Web-based applications and services.

More on ComponentOne ComponentOne release includes suite of Ajax-enabled ASP.NET components ComponentOne updates popular grid and charting tools

Most of these components integrate directly with Visual Studio 2005 Windows Forms features such as Smart Tags, Snap Lines, data binding, Managed Themes, and so forth, with comprehensive support for ASP.NET 2.0 likewise covered. At prices that start at around $1,000 per developer seat ($750 to upgrade from earlier versions), pricing isn't prohibitive, either (expect to pay $600 or so per year for each seat for continued subscriptions, including technical support).

You can visit the vendor's Web site to check out its demo center or its live examples any time you like. Either way, you'll be able to inspect the capabilities that these components deliver, and get a sense of how easy it is to use them in the context of Visual Studio development. Definitely worth a visit, and of great potential interest to those seeking a strong component library for their workbenches.

Ed Tittel is a writer and trainer whose interests include XML and development topics, along with IT Certification and information security. E-mail etittel@techtarget.com with comments, questions, or suggested topics or tools to review. Cool tools rule!

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