This is the third in a series of reviews that will cover what is contained in the DevExpress DXperience Universal Edition. This is the most complete of the subscription packages available from DevExpress. The other packages include Enterprise, WinForms, and ASP.NET. For a matrix of what each package contains, check out their edition page. In this review I will examine what is available for working with WinForms.
There are three basic ways that you can acquire the controls for working with WinForms. The first is, of course, within the DXperience Universal Edition. This contains pretty much everything you need for creating a ground to sky WinForms or Web-based application.
The second is with DXperience WinForms which is a collection of WinForm development tools that are designed to add advanced capabilities to your desktop applications. The suite includes a whole series of controls that give you the ability to deliver more features in your applications with higher quality and in less time.
You will be able to give your users much more professional interfaces while being more productive within Visual Studio. These more functional features will provide more capabilities with relatively little additional effort on your part.
Finally, you can also purchase most of these controls as standalone suites that target specific features. I will highlight all of the controls below. The Reporting tool and Printing-Exporting library as well as the Charting control I will go over in more detail in part four.
What are the controls that you get with DXperience WinForms?
• XtraGrid Suite is a very comprehensive Grid and Data editor for VS.NET. There are five built-in data views; Card, Layout, Grid, Branded Grid, and Advanced Branded Grid. You can create your own custom views and you can also have different views for master and detail records.
• XtraEditors Library is a flexible masked edit control that gives you the ability to create simple masks easily, but also provides you with full regular expression support. This gives you the ability to address even the most complex data entry scenarios. There are over 35 data edit and multi-purpose controls that can be used either bound or unbound.
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