Infragistics has been a market leader in the presentation layer components industry for over 18 years. With a comprehensive portfolio of multi-platform Enterprise Software products and services, it has achieved global reach in nearly every Fortune 2000 company. Infragistics empowers developers to build and style great application user interfaces for Windows Forms, ASP.NET, WPF and JSF, and additionally offers user interface test tools, support, training and consulting services.
Infragistics NetAdvantage provides the most comprehensive set of components for quickly building and styling commercial class user interfaces for Windows Forms, ASP.NET, JSF and WPF applications. The company's advanced user interface controls allow developers to produce all of the familiar interfaces your users expect, such as Office 2007 UI, Windows XP, and Vista. Its controls are widely deployed for use in the hottest architectures such as Web 2.0, SharePoint and Microsoft’s Composite Applications Block (CAB). Within every NetAdvantage product, Infragistics provide global product support, source code to controls and frameworks, guaranteed multiple releases yearly of customer driven products and features and much more.
ActiveX Components (ActiveX Controls, COM Objects & OLE Objects)
Microsoft first introduced the term ActiveX in 1996 when they launched a downloadable user interface control or software component that could be used by Internet Explorer to give more interactive or active content on a Web page to the reader. ActiveX controls were a re-branded subset of OLE custom controls (OCX) or OLE controls (OCXes) that were streamlined for downloading over the Internet and that could be digitally signed for security and authentication reasons. These ActiveX downloads were also tagged or marked as being safe for scripting and safe for initialization, to help give users confidence in using them in ActiveX Internet apps, as they were less likely to start making unauthorized actions on their systems. ActiveX controls also supported threading models, such as Apartment Model Threading, to try and improve performance in a multi-user or multi-process environment.
OLE controls (OCX's) or Object Linking and Embedding controls were themselves the successor to VBX controls first introduced by Microsoft to help programmers extend the functionality and features of their Visual Basic program by buying and reusing a VBX control built by another programmer or company, with expertise in a specific area. VBXes were limited to 16 bit usage for example on Windows 3.x, OCXes were available for both 16 bit or 32 bit architectures and began being widely used as people adopted Windows 95, although most people tended to use VBXes on 16-bit systems and OCX controls or OLE components on 32-bit systems for performance reasons. OLE itself was based on earlier work by Microsoft in their Office products to allow data to be exchanged and reused as objects inside other documents or files, such as embedding an Excel spreadsheet in a Word document and updating the content of that Excel spreadsheet for display using Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE). Hence the term OLE document, that is still in use today.
OLE was part of the Microsoft COM or Component Object Model, that enabled programmers to reuse software components and services in a logical and object oriented manner. COM was extended and expanded over the years to include DCOM, the Distributed Component Object Model that allowed programmers to call OLE objects or COM objects situated on other computers or servers. COM+ was added to support transaction services using technologies such as Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) and this first appeared when Windows 2000 was launched to better support distributed transactions in more complex applications, where higher performance and throughput was required. COM has gradually become a common term used to refer to: COM, DCOM, COM+, OLE and ActiveX technologies in general.
ActiveX components can be created in a variety of object oriented programming languages, but are most commonly created using C++ and the Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC), such as: MFC 4.0, MFC 4.2 and MFC 6.0. When VB 5 was released in became possible for a Visual Basic programmer to create an ActiveX component for reuse by other people and whilst most programmers claim that the best ActiveX components were written in Visual C++ or by utilizing the ActiveX Template Library, it did not stop some entrepreneurial developers from Janus Systems writing one of the bestselling ActiveX UI controls of all time in VB5 and VB6, called Janus GridEx, a VB6 ActiveX, that gives the look and feel of the Microsoft Outlook UI inside your app.
ActiveX components and ActiveX controls come with a variety of file extensions such as: .exe, .dll and .ocx and these denote a certain type of usage either in-process as part of your program or app (an ActiveX DLL), or out-of-process as a standalone executable (an ActiveX Exe), as an ActiveX control or OCX control mainly used as a UI control on a form or page. Downloadable ActiveX controls are also packaged as .cab files or Cabinet files. These CAB files are packages of files compressed to take up less space and hence can be downloaded more efficiently over the Internet.
In this ActiveX Component gallery you will find a variety of commercial products that are ActiveX objects or ActiveX controls that people sometime refer to as VB controls or as a VB object, as they are often used within Visual Basic. You will find ActiveX Windows components that allow you to carry out visuals tasks, such as an ActiveX UI control for displaying video or images, an ActiveX image control or a non-Visual ActiveX upload component that will allow you to push a file up onto a server over the Internet using HTTP or FTP protocols.
Include robust, data-bound components for accessing and displaying data. Data Widgets is a set of six bound ActiveX controls for Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 or higher and other ActiveX host environments. Data Widgets supports OLE DB and ADO data binding methods. Featured is the DataGrid, a fully editable data grid identical in look and feel to the Access grid. The DataGrid included in Data Widgets 3, SSDBGrid, allows updating, adding and deletion of records, along with unbound columns. SSDBGrid also supports Bound, Virtual and AddItem modes. Infragistics Data Widgets was formerly called Sheridan Data Widgets.
Give your applications the look and feel of Microsoft Outlook. ActiveListBar is an ActiveX component that provide users with the ability to group and categorize a variety of items for quick access. ActiveListBar incorporates a system of sliding groups, each of which is identified by its header. Clicking a group's header causes the group to become active, slide into view, and display the items it contains. ActiveListBar is fully ActiveX compliant, and supports Internet operation through the inclusion of special URL properties for graphics and sound resources. Please, note that Infragistics ActiveListBar (ssactivelistbar) was formerly known as Sheridan or Shersoft ActiveListBar Control.
Resize and reshape your forms and controls virtually any way you wish. ActiveThreed Plus is a set of eleven 32-bit ActiveX controls that give your applications the look and feel of today's most popular interfaces: Office '97, Microsoft PowerPoint, Internet and more. With ActiveThreed Plus you can dynamically resize and reposition your picture boxes and controls, including fonts. As the size and shape of the forms change, the controls included are automatically resized and repositioned to maintain their original layout. Infragistics ActiveThreed Plus (formerly called Sheridan ActiveThreed) includes SSResizer, SSRibbon, SSScroll, SSSplash, and SSTransition, SSPanel and more.
Provide an advanced interface for displaying hierarchical data. ActiveTreeView is a 32-bit ActiveX component designed for drill-down capabilities for databases. It extends the tree view control inherent to Visual Basic and features three modes of connectivity. ActiveTreeView is designed to operate in all ActiveX-compliant host environments and appears just like the Office 97 tree structures. Features include ToolTips, ScrollBarTips, LineTips, MultiColumns, and MultiSelect for selecting multiple items. Infragistics ActiveTreeView was formerly called Sheridan ActiveTreeView.
Create dynamic calendars with this set of four reusable components. Calendar Widgets consists of: Sheridan MonthView - for displaying up to three months at a time for quick selection of multiple dates. Holidays, weekends, and special days can be highlighted; YearView - All the features of month view with the added functionality of displaying a year at a time. Calendar Widgets also includes Sheridan DateCombo - Allows you to specify input and format masks so dates are entered and stored correctly; Sheridan DayView - Allow incorporation of a daily time schedule, with intervals from 5 to 60 minutes. Infragistics Calendar Widgets was formerly called Sheridan Calendar Widgets.
Add a resizable Explorer-style interface to your application. Data Explorer creates an intuitive application interface that pairs a TreeView with a viewer pane separated by a splitter bar. Use Data Explorer to create a Windows Explorer or Microsoft Outlook style interface for your application. Data Explorer includes an Outlook Bar component for adding shortcuts that can be linked to folder views, and a resizer component (SSResizer) to create applications that are resolution independent. Infragistics Data Explorer was previously called Sheridan Protoview Data Explorer.
Design enhanced user interfaces complete with rich toolbars and tabs. Designer Widgets is a collection of ActiveX components for VB that includes: Dockable Toolbar - to create floating toolbars of buttons that can be docked to the top, sides or bottom of your MDI form. The Notebook Tab Control - for notebook-style interfaces complete with "turning" pages and the ability to design customized notebook styles by varying the look and feel of the ring binder, the tabs style. The Index Tab Control - for a tabbed "index card"-like display allows you to present several screens' worth of data in the space of one screen. And FormFX - for total control over the appearance and behaviour of your forms. Infragistics Designer Widgets was formerly known as Sheridan Designer Widgets
Build professional database front ends with this collection powerful components. ActiveX Component Suite is a collection of COM components featuring a variety of functionality including: Data Explorer - for creating Explorer-like file and folder data views, DataTable - for data bound grids, ScheduleX - for task management and calendaring capability, and TreeViewX - for viewing hierarchical datasets from OLE DB/ADO data sources.
Create diagramming interfaces for anything from telephone call centers to database management tools. InterAct is an ActiveX component that snaps into any IDE and integrates itself into your application interface. Use pre-built objects or customize InterAct to your specifications Includes a number of pre-built entities, relations and diagram formats for "out of the box" functionality. Additional customization is available with InterAct's rich programming model.
Create applications with the familiar, easy-to-use interfaces of Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office, Windows Explorer and Windows XP. NetAdvantage ActiveX includes grids, toolbars, navigation components, scheduling, editors, explorer UI and additional UI elements. Products included in the NetAdvantage ActiveX are UltraGrid, UltraToolBars, ScheduleX, Data Explorer and ActiveTreeView.