Microsoft Office styling across all .NET platforms, and the addition of the Office 2010 Ribbon to its Windows Forms-based products, highlight the changes in the release today of Infragistics’ NetAdvantage Ultimate suite of user interface development tools.

The suite includes Infragistics’ UI control sets for Windows Forms and ASP.NET, as well as its line-of-business toolkits for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight, along with two data visualization controls for WPF and Silverlight, according to Andrew Flick, product unit manager for Infragistics’ NetAdvantage product line.

The move to the Office style was necessary “to enable customers rolling it out to have their applications take on the 2010 look and feel,” he said. “We didn’t want people working in Outlook 2010 to have apps that look like they were created three years ago.”

The company is also bringing a unified XAML strategy to its line-of-business controls for WPF and Silverlight. A new xamSchedule control for schedules and a new xamDataTree for data handling have been introduced to those tool sets, Flick explained. The xamDataTree “supports infinite depth, millions of nodes, that can be expanded and drilled down with no problems,” he said. The company also tuned the controls for performance gains, he added.

The two new data visualization control sets are part of the company’s unified XAML strategy for enabling developers to create dynamic business intelligence applications, Flick said. New support for SAP as a data source and support for writing OLAP-based Pivot Grid output to the Excel 2010 format (.xlsx) are built in, he said.

Pivot Grid is used to present multi-dimensional data that can be drilled into to extract deeper meaning, Flick explained. “These data components are very high-end,” he said. Also, xamMap, which was available in the previous version of Silverlight Data Visualization (10.2), is now in the WPF Data Visualization toolkit.

Infragistics introduced xamDataChart in the 10.2 version of the data visualization packages, and in this release, the company is targeting high-performance scenarios with new chart types such as spider charts, polar line and polar spline graphs, radial charts, and more. The data visualization packages also include an early release of xamOrgChart, used to create high-performance hierarchical organization charts that represent workgroup structures.

The NetAdvantage Ultimate 2010 Volume 3 suite sells for US$1,895, and jumps to $2,395 with priority support. NetAdvantage for .NET, which includes the UI controls for Windows Forms, ASP.NET, WPF and Silverlight, sells for $1,295, and $1,795 with priority support. Each product also is sold individually for $995, or $1,495 with priority support.

“We’ve always bundled things together,” Flick said. “There are hundreds of controls, everything anyone needs to build line-of-business applications and create data visualizations. Now we’re offering everything individually.”