We are starting 2012 off with a bang…Essential Studio 2012 Volume 1 has been released!

At Syncfusion, our Mobile MVC platform is on the forefront of our development efforts. The Essential Studio 2012 Volume 1 release contains the largest ASP.NET MVC suite for mobile with 12 new controls. Our customers can now develop with the highly anticipated cross-platform mobile grid and the HTML 5 gauge. Samples of our new controls are available for users to interact with. We have expanded the HTML 5 Gauge for ASP.NET to include digital and rolling gauges. Our HTML 5 efforts were focused around our customers who can now take advantage of the high performance, ease of user interactivity, and stunning visuals enabled by the HTML 5 CANVAS element. Other features include:

• A fully client-side RDL reporting engine added to our reporting suite—standard reports, no server license needed.
• Bing Maps integration, bringing rich detail to Silverlight and WPF mapping apps.
• Gantt control enhancements, simplifying project management.

Everything we do here at Syncfusion is to make application development faster, easier, and sleeker. We based our latest and greatest features on customer requests. Yes, we listen and react so that we can be the best development partner on the market. Download the latest evaluation on our website.

By Tres Watkins

We just wrapped up exhibiting at Visual Studio Live! Orlando, an event we sponsored with Microsoft. Being exhibiting sponsors, we went in with the mindset that this would be an exercise in disseminating information about our products—delivering the Syncfusion message. By the end of the week, after having spoken to so many developers not just about our products, but about their projects, predictions, and points of pain, it became clear that this event was more so an exchange of ideas than a broadcast of messaging.

This was the first VS Live! event I had personally attended. Going into the event, I knew we would spend substantial time talking about what we, Syncfusion, do as a component vendor. I anticipated conversing about the needs of today’s developers—the features being sought and the technologies being used. I was, however, pleasantly surprised at the number of conversations I had concerning the core reason everyone was in attendance in the first place—their current projects.

This past week I heard of a multitude of cases where .NET was being used to address the needs of some highly specialized sectors. Mapping in oil and gas, tracking genomes in seed breeding, creating an automated battery of questions for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) used in psychiatry and psychology—these were just a few that stood out amid a myriad of others spanning from warehouse management to book publishing.

What I found most remarkable in talking with many developers, working in multiple sectors on a multitude of solutions, is that the conversion would inevitably come to close on one phrase: “But now we’re thinking about mobile.” And upon that point, all eyes would drift to the tablets displayed at our table, as if the promise of a better tomorrow were held within that slim design.

And perhaps it is.

The one common element I found in the business requirements of all these cases, spanning numerous industries, is that each had users roving in the field; it’s those users who want, and are coming to expect, that mobile devices will meet their business needs at work as readily as they have met their personal needs at home.

Throughout the halls of VS Live!, “mobile” was the resounding cry, and it’s my understanding that the sessions on Web and mobile apps garnered heavy interest. So, if we’ve all signed onto mobile, the question now must be how to go forward with it.

We’ll be publishing a series of articles over the coming weeks that will address how to take your current assets from desktop to mobile devices. If you’d like to follow those articles as they are released, subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog; I’ll be posting notifications as articles roll out.

Guest post by Andy Gray, CenterSpace Software

When building numerical applications, you'll inevitably be faced with the challenge of taking raw data and computed results and presenting information in a way that makes business sense to the end user. NMath 5.1 added some new visualization features to help. We've also worked closely with the team at Syncfusion to make it very easy to create visualizations of NMath data with their powerful Essential Chart component.

We've released some free adapter code that will allow you to create an Essential Chart control from NMath data structures with as little as one line of code. We've also written some technical documentation that walks you through many common graphing scenarios using the Syncfusion components. This white paper details how to:

· Download and reference the CenterSpace.NMath.Charting.Syncfusion.NMathChart

· Create and configure Essential Chart controls, and bind charts to NMath data structures.

· Use the NMathChart adapters to create and customize Essential Chart ChartControl instances easily.

· Plot vectors, matrices, functions, fitted functions, function peaks, least squares classes, and histograms using a variety of chart types.

Click here to download the free adapter code and detailed instructions. 

I recently came across an interesting article on ZDNet. The author, Jason Perlow, suggests that Microsoft should be putting out a $199 tablet PC that uses the Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) platform. He goes on to speculate that the reason Microsoft is not putting out such a system is politics and their internal commitment to Windows 8 as the tablet platform of choice.

I could not disagree more with the premise of this article. The reason Microsoft cannot put out a half-baked tablet, just for the sake of getting into the tablet market, is that they are Microsoft—enterprise customers hold Microsoft to a higher standard.

Amazon or Barnes and Noble (B&N) can put out a tablet offering that is far from perfect. Nobody has lofty expectations of a tablet from Amazon or B&N. Most realize that such devices are meant to serve primarily as a front-end for offerings from Amazon and B&N, and that is what the market expects them to be. I had a chance to play with Amazon’s Kindle Fire. It is a nice device, but by no means is it close to what I refer to as a Microsoft level of completeness. For instance, consider this: The native Kindle Fire e-mail client does not, to my knowledge, natively support Microsoft Exchange. Would Microsoft be able to get away with a similar offering?

Microsoft sets the standard? Not so fast, you say. Look at Apple. They have put out a perfect tablet PC, the iPad. It has a gorgeous e-mail client and an overall excellent user experience. Is it not the gold standard? Doesn’t Apple manage to meet and exceed all expectations? Well, not quite. Consider this: The iPad, while being an extraordinarily capable device, does not have an Exchange client that performs to Microsoft standards. It took iOS version 5 to be able to perform the following tasks with its native e-mail client.

• Formatting text using bold, italic, or underlined fonts.
• Creating indents in the text of your message.
• Flagging important messages.

Can you imagine a Microsoft e-mail client not being able to do any of the above even in version 1.0?

It may not be said very often, but Microsoft is the gold standard when it comes to business applications. Microsoft is very much aware of what is expected from them and they are putting in every effort to deliver a stellar tablet experience that meets and exceeds the needs of their discerning user base. This, I believe, is why they are taking their time. Windows 8 will definitely be worth the wait.

So, as we look at the shiny tablets that will ship this Christmas, keep in mind the best is yet to come!

A long-time Blackberry user, I started using a Nokia E72 a few years back. I really loved the keyboard on the Blackberry, but travelling with it was difficult. Switching between networks, for devices using BlackBerry® Enterprise Server, takes more effort than switching out a SIM card. The Nokia E72 made it possible to have a near Blackberry keyboard with the added convenience of being able to easily switch networks when travelling outside the country.

I really liked the E72, but after a couple of years, I felt it was time to move to a Windows Phone 7 device. Syncfusion has been shipping components on that platform for a while now, and I was curious to experience it first-hand. The first phone I tried was an HD7S by HTC, which I found to be very user friendly.

A lot has been written about the huge Android and iOS application ecosystem and the relatively few applications on the Windows Phone 7 platform. However, in my experience I found that all key applications I was interested in were available on Windows Phone 7. Unfortunately, after a month of use, I could not get used to the virtual keyboard. This is not an issue with the Windows Phone 7 platform; I have tried virtual keyboards on iOS phones and did not like the experience as well.

Having experienced the ease of use and power of the Windows Phone 7 platform, I was reluctant to go back to a Symbian phone or a Blackberry. I looked around for a Windows Phone 7 phone with a portrait keyboard. Given the immense popularity of Blackberry-style keyboards, I was surprised to find just one Windows Phone 7 device with a portrait-style hardware keyboard, the Dell Venue Pro. Dell sells the devices unlocked with a choice of T-Mobile or AT&T frequencies in the United States. The Dell Venue Pro had several early users complaining about Wi-Fi use. It appears that Dell fixed these problems earlier this year.

The device I received has been perfect. I upgraded it to Mango and have been using it for a few days. This is simply the best phone that I have had. The keyboard is one notch below the Blackberry, but the phone and the Windows Phone 7.1 operating system are superior in every other way.

As with other Microsoft platforms, the development story on the Windows Phone 7 platform is very good. Silverlight is a very functional platform with great documentation and plenty of third-party support. There is bound to be a version of winRT available on the platform in the months ahead. If you wish to develop and deploy a cross-platform solution that will work on any modern mobile device, HTML5 support on Mango is quite good and will keep getting better.

I strongly believe that the next couple of years will see a major move towards the Windows Phone 7 platform. This is indeed being confirmed by recent research reports: http://www.itwire.com/it-industry-news/market/50815-windows-phone-on-the-rise-challenging-blackberry. The Windows Phone 7 platform is in every way competitive with currently dominant platforms. A great phone platform with a sweet set of developer tools combined with a huge ecosystem of components. I see exciting times ahead!