2007 R2 goes RTM

Over the past few months, I’ve blogged about the new functionalities and products that you can expect in the upcoming WebUI Studio.NET 2007 R2. You may have noticed that we did not post any new items in the past month. That is because we are extremely busy preparing the new exciting products and ensuring they meet our high standards in quality, testing and documentation.

Our goal was to release 2007 R2 by July 31st, 2007. However, due to some latebreaking issues, we have to set the date to today, so it is only one day slip. Subscribers will be notified of the new products and immediate download later today.

I believe you can already find the new functionalities of WebGrid, WebDragDropExtender and WebDesktop inside the white papers in my previous post. In this post, I’ll do some write-up on WebTreeView since it has many interesting features.

One of the most significant offerings in this R2 release is WebTreeView, which includes many powerful features and extremely fast performance. We’ve been tweaking the performance extensively in the past months, such as loading hundred of nodes in both first load and on-demand mode. One of the interesting challenges is that, the TreeView is designed with full OOP methodology (like the rest of Intersoft’s products), which is usually the cause of slow performance if it is not designed properly. However, with our technologically advanced OO implementation, we do not suffer on performance issue as the objects are populated transparently as user interacted with the TreeView elements.

 The support for drag and drop in WebTreeView is also very comprehensive. Unlike other similar control, WebTreeView allows you to drop into four modes, which are Root, Child, Leaf and Sibling. The powerful thing is that you can enable all of them, or only several of them according to your needs with just property set. You can also drag between one TreeView to another TreeView instance. You can also drag and drop from one TreeView to another Intersoft’s controls (such as WebGrid, etc) that supported by WebDragDropExtender.

The thing that I feel most significant in the latest milestones is the improvement of the products in architectural level, such as by leveraging powerful interfaces concept and other OO features. For instance in our recent successful approach, WebDragDropExtender and WebTreeView are two different products that do not know each other (in each’s product codes level). However when used together, WebDragDropExtender and WebTreeView can recognize each other at runtime. The drag control and drop control specified in WebDragDropExtender can automatically recognize WebTreeView as valid drop object. This means you can drag a ASP.NET Label and drop it to TreeView or drag a WebTreeView’s node then drop it to a ASP.NET Panel in consistent manner by using the same mechanism, same event life cycle and same concepts. Nice!

Well, that’s all for today’s blog. When you’ve got the RTM bits installed today, just go straight to launch the Live Samples. We hope you liked the new Live Samples UI that we have revamped, and of course, the entire new offerings. Happy developing!

All the best,
Jimmy.