I am back again with a new post, after a long while. Since my first post on Microsoft One Note I was not able to write up more due to various reasons :-). Today, this is a completely different and my first post of this kind. This is about my experiences/gist of the Infragistics Technology Road show at the Le Meridian, Bangalore.

The event started with an introductory note by Gary Schwartz, Vice President, Marketing, Infragistics Inc. He started with a little bit of history about the company and concluded with the latest tools and controls they have for HTML5 and jQuery. One intriguing product which could benefit a variety of audience was Shareplus, which allows people to add/open/edit documents from SharePoint site on any mobile device.

The next session was about “Building next generation UI with HTML5 and jQuery” by Abhishek Narain, Technical Evangelist at Infragistics. He had quickly walked thru the features and a rich set of tags available in the HTML5, explained the power of jQuery and showed some interesting demos on really cool apps developed using HTML5 and jQuery5. More of HTML5 demos are available here. One such app which was developed with Netadvantage for jQuery and igDatasource control of Infragistics, which binds a single data source to variety of controls like maps, a grid and a list view impressed me a lot. That made me realize how easy a developer’s job would be, when the readily available third party controls are used rather than wasting time in recreating the same 🙂

Following that was the “The Modern UI Design Principle: Windows 8” by Ujjwal Kumar, Technical Evangelist at Microsoft. This was purely about the design principles, guidelines and what all the aspects one should keep in mind while designing apps targeting Win 8. The whole idea of designing an application is changing with Win 8, as the application one develops should be capable of running in a desktop, tablet, and a mobile phone. The key aspect in designing/developing any windows 8 application is to give the most importance to the content and to present the same in a highly visually appealing way which drives the attention of the users to download the app. Navigation is not a worry anymore as almost all of the Win 8 apps comes with a horizontal panning by default (except when you run the app in snap view where only vertical scroll will be enabled). I would like to restrict myself from writing more about the Win 8 app development as I have not really got my hands dirty into it. Yet to try out the new VS2012 and Win 8 RTM. Will write more post my hands on experience on Win 8 apps development 🙂

The concluding session was more of an Infragistics customer experience from Krishna Kumar/Ram of TCS. They shared their experience on how they got into a contract with Infragistics in 2009 and started using their WPF controls for a time critical Claim Handling application for one of their clients. The key take away from this session was the lessons learnt shared by them that is, the role of any third party vendors wouldn’t end as we sign up with them and buy their controls; to enhance the ease of development and reduce maintenance issues , a regular update of the controls from the vendors is mandatory 🙂 The other experiences being how productive it was to make use of the controls than developing on their own, which helped in focusing on delivering the actual business functionality.

Post this session was the networking time. The audience were set free to mingle with folks from Infragistics and among others and were having healthy discussions over technologies and about IG controls, and of course everything over the lunch table @ Le Meridian!!!

Last but not the least was the most interesting part, “The Infragistics Developers Contest” announced by the Infragistics team. This is an open contest for all the developers. In this, one has to download the Infragistics control and develop some cool and awesome app using them and should submit the same before “04-Sept-2012”. The winner of this contest will be awarded a ‘TABLET’.

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