One of the many benifits as an Infragistics MVP is that you get quite early involved in product development in order to give feedback.

This could either be feedback on a new feature, an API change, or a brand new product!

Last spring it was time to give feedback again. There was an email on the Infragistics NDA mailing list which announced that work on a new product - Infragistics NetAdvantage for Powershell - had been started. Being an absolute Powershell fan, I felt really excited to offer my help with alpha and beta testing, giving feedback, etc.

After some great discussions between the director of product management Joseph Berres, lead developer Ambrose J. Tall and some Infragistis MVPs, the team managed to finish a first proof of concept prototype in early September. Some weeks later I met Dr. Tony Komischke, Director of User Experience at Infragistics, at the Basta conference in Germany. There he gave me a first demo of the product. At this point he was able to show me an early Version of the powershell grid: Infragistics NetAdvantage for Powershell powerGrid. I would have loved to see the charting component powerChart, too. Unfortunately it hadn't been ready for presentation at that time.

To my question how the idea for a whole powershell suite had been born, Tony Komischke gave me a quite interesting answer:

It was actually one of our internal IT guys who had the idea. During a meeting he complained that lately more and more server products came to market without an usable admin UI. Instead he had to struggle with some colourless command line tools.

This situation started the whole thing. We all thought that Windows administrators love decent UIs and don't want to work with a boring command line. If they liked the command line, they would have become Linux administrators!

And that's the point of Infragistics NetAdvantage for Powershell. With this product, we give administrators back what they deserve!

Since Basta conference some time went by. The product has nearly arrived at its final state. Starting with tomorrow, registered users will be able to download at CTP Version of it in the download area of Infrastics' homepage.

The first webinars on NetAdvantage for Powershell will be made available approximately next week by Infragistics new media evangelist Jeff Shoemaker.

During the quaterly Infragistics MVP call, Mr Beres stated:

"We really wanted to show off our high end visualizations in a DOS window" said Beres.  "PowerShell gave us a great opportunity to mix data analytics with the new features in the Command Window, like colorization" he continued.

As an Infragistics MVP I already enjoyed testing the product. Below you're going to find some impressions:

The powershell standard output

Output as PowerGrid. Notice the usage of the sortable table pattern as well as table and column borders.

The corner treatements pattern which includes curves in all rectangle corners didn't make it into the CTP as there were some performance issues with GDI+ and the gpu's hardware acceleration.

Output as PowerChart. I've chosen a bar chart as output type

(English version below)
30 begeisterte Fans des manged Codes fanden gestern Abend Ihren Weg nach Koblenz, um bei unserer .NET User Group Tony Hasselhoff Lombardo, ASP.NET MVP und Lead-Evangelist bei Infragistics, zu hören.

Tony erzählte in einem sehr spannenden Vortrag, was mit Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 fernab von sinnfreien animierten Buttons und TextBoxen machen können. Ganz Konkret ging es um Geschäftsapplikationen, mit denen unsere Kunden sogar arbeiten können

Unter anderem Sprach Tony über:

• Authentifizierung und Authorisierung
• Das Speichern von Benutzereinstellungen
• Datenzugriff und -bindung
• sowie das MVVM Pattern.

Entgegen meiner ersten Befürchtung war die Gruppe trotz des ersten fremdsprachlichen Vortrages recht aktiv und stellte viele Fragen. Außerdem freute ich mich sehr darüber, so viele neue Gesichter zu sehen. Hoffentlich findet der ein oder andere zu zukünftigen Treffen seinen Weg zu uns.

Als User Group freuen wir uns natürlich sehr darüber, dass wir Tony als einzige Gruppe in Europa exklusiv zu Gast haben durften. Vielen Dank an dieser Stelle noch mal an Ihn und das ganze restliche Team von Infragistics, die diesen Vortrag möglich machten!

Als kleines Bonbon sponsorte Infragistics zum Abschluss des Vortrags sogar noch eine MSDN Premium Subscription sowie eine vollständige NetAdvantage Suite, die wir innerhalb der Gruppe verlosen durften.

Als Fazit nehme ich mit:

• Silverlight eröffnet eine Reihe neuer Möglichkeiten im Web
• 5 Erwachsene passen in einen Peugeot 106, bequem ist es aber nur für den Fahrer
• Man sollte auch grauen Text lesen
• Jemand der kein deutsches Bier gewohnt ist, verwechselt leicht den "Kleiner als" Operator "<" mit einem öffnenden Generic

English version:

Yesterday evening, 30 excited fans of managed code found their way to Koblenz in order to listen  to Tony Hasselhoff Lombardo, ASP.NET MVP and Infragistics lead evangangelist, at our local .NET user group.

Tony did a great talk on the possibilities of Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 beyond rotating buttons or text boxes. Actually the whole thing was about Line of Business Applications, which our customers could eventually use to get their job done

During his talk Tony covered:

• Authentication and authorization
• Preserving user settings
• data access and binding
• as well as the MVVM pattern

Despite my initial worries, the group was very active and asked a lot of question. So nobody seemed to be shy at our first talk in a foreign language. In addition, I've been very happy to see so many new faces during the meeting. Hopefully some of them will find their way to future meetings, too.

As a user group we were of course very happy to be the only group to present Tony in Europe. Many thanks again to him and the whole Infragisitcs team for making this talk possible.

As a small bonbon, Infragistics sponsored our meeting by raffling a MSDN Premium Subscription as well as a full NetAdvantage Suite.

My resume of the meeting is:

• Silverlight gives you a whole set of new possibilities for web applications
• 5 persons do fit into a Peugeot 106, but it's only comfortable for the driver
• You should read the grey text, too
• Somebody who's not used to German beer may easily mix up a "lower then"-operator (<) with an opening generic

As I’m very interested in new technologies, I recently downloaded – like maybe hundreds of other people – Infragistics NetAdvantage for WPF 2007 Vol 2. My goal was to evaluate Infragistics newest technology.

Unfortunately, my enthusiasm was dampend a little bit, when I tried to run the sample application “xamFeatureBrowser”. Instead of showing the newest and coolest WPF features, the application crashed and displayed the windows error reporting dialog. Actually, this wasn’t what I really expected

My sales contact at Infragistics confirmed, that the sample application shows this quite unexpected behavior on non English operating systems only.

In order to find a solution for that problem, I opened the xamFeatureBrowser solution in Visual Studio 2005 and started the debugger. Immediately after starting, the following dialog appeared on my screen:

Afterwards, the application crashed again. A short research on the internet showed, that this problem mostly occurs if you save a solution with Visual Studio 2008 Beta 1 and try to open it with VS 2005 later – independent of the operating system language. As the application runs fine under English operating systems, this couldn’t be the problem's root cause.

My next step in hunting down this error was using windows debugging tools, which showed the following exception:

An exception like this occurs, when the CLR can’t find a resource file for your current culture and there’s no resource file for the invariant culture.

The Solution:

On my system, I’ve got the samples running by following these steps:

1. Open the xamFeatureBrowser solution. On my system it's located at:
   "C:\Users\Public\Documents\Infragistics\NetAdvantage for WPF 2007 Vol. 2\Samples\xamFeatureBrowser"
   
2. Change solution configuration from "Debug - Full trust" to "Release". I’m not sure, if this step is necessary with Visual Studio 2008, too.
   
   
   
3. Open app.xaml.cs and add the following constructor:
   

           public App()

           {

               CultureInfo objCI = new CultureInfo("en-US");

               Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = objCI;

               Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = objCI;

           }

   
   Thanks to heroic, who posted this code in the infragistics forum.
   
4. Change the file properties of "TableOfContents.xml". I set Build Action to Content and Copy to Output Directory to Copy always
   
   
5. Run the solution
   
   

Those 5 steps should do the trick. Let's hope, that Infragistics fixes the bug in the next version