.NET developers want to build great user experiences, but they can’t always rely on their favorite tool providers to support their needs as technologies evolve. With DevExpress, software teams are building applications for Windows Forms, WPF, ASP.NET, Silverlight, Windows 8 and Windows 10, as well as hybrid apps using HTML5 and JavaScript and native iOS apps. Regardless of the platform or computing devices developers are targeting, DevExpress delivers the controls, tools and frameworks they need to deliver stunning, modern user experiences.
“Customers stay with us for a long time. The reason they stay with us through Windows Forms, ASP.NET, WPF, Windows 8 and Windows 10 is because they’re familiar with our API and how we present our controls,” said Julian Bucknall, CTO of DevExpress. “As new technologies emerge, they know we’ll be there with the UI controls they need, want and must have.”
DevExpress was named to the SD Times 100 list again for its dedication to innovation and long-term commitment to customers in the User Experience category. During the last year, the company has continued to enhance its products for all platforms while anticipating its customers’ future requirements with timely product development.
DevExpress offers high-performance UI controls across platforms that deliver unmatched aesthetics. It also offers cross-platform reporting and document automation tools, enterprise-class report servers and analytics dashboard tools, code-debug-refactor tools, Web-testing tools, Delphi and C++ Builder products, and a free Xamarin.Forms data grid control. Its flagship product, DevExpress Universal, includes all DevExpress.NET products in a single, integrated suite. DXperience, its other extensive package, includes all DevExpress.NET controls and the Code Rush code-debug-refactor tools. Control suites, tools and other offerings can also be purchased separately.
Introducing DevExpress Universal v15.1
DevExpress Universal v15.1 is a comprehensive software development suite for Visual Studio. It’s packed with dozens of new products and features that enable development teams to create compelling, high-impact desktop, Web and mobile solutions that fully address a broad range of use-case scenarios. Whether creating Office-inspired Windows apps, or building mobile solutions with touch-enabled HTML5 widgets, DevExpress Universal helps developers leverage existing skill sets and technology investments while meeting tomorrow’s challenges head-on.
“We help our customers create business apps that include some sort of business analysis and data visualization. Our goal is to help developers present data in a way that makes sense to end users,” said Bucknall.
Toward that end, the DevExpress dashboard continues to gain features to support the analytics platforms for developers who want to build fully customizable decision support systems and distribute them royalty-free. DevExpress also fortified its reporting capabilities with a document server that allows users to create PDFs, Excel spreadsheets or Word documents automatically from their data. The automation can be extended to e-mail so data can be packaged and sent to executives for review.
Also included in DevExpress Universal v15.1 are a new navigation control and a high-performance export engine. DevExpress also extended the capabilities of its spreadsheet controls and added conditional formatting expression editors for all major products.
“In a recent survey, 90% of our customers told us they are very likely to build traditional Windows desktop apps in the next 24 months. This release includes key enhancements across both our Windows Forms and WPF product lines for desktop developers,” said Bucknall. “Also, 93% of our customers reaffirmed their commitment to traditional Web applications, so we’ve added major new products and capabilities to our ASP.NET and HTML5 product lines.”
DevExpress’ comprehensive HTML5 and Javascript widget set has been extended with a new HTML5 pivot grid and scheduler so developers can deliver even better data analytics for mobile devices.
Web developers will appreciate the high-impact, touch-enabled solutions in the latest ASP.NET WebForms controls and MVC extensions. There is also a Rich Text Editor that lets developers add powerful word-processing capabilities to their apps, easily. The ASP.NET ribbon and spreadsheet controls allow developers to create Office-inspired Web apps that deliver the functionality end users expect.
What’s Next
Microsoft is launching .NET 5, Windows 10, ASP.NET 5, MVC 6 and a new version of Visual Studio in the second half of 2015. As always, DevExpress will be there to support developers who are embracing the new platforms, operating system and IDE.
“Our thrust in v15.2 is going to be more about supporting those technologies. With the new Visual Studio and Windows 10 releases at the end of July, we’ll be releasing a suite for the Windows Universal platform,” said Bucknall. “We’ve also been concentrating on ASP.NET 5 and MVC 6, so when they’re launched, we’re ready with an optimized suite of controls and a suite of engines that support those platforms.”
Expect to see dashboards, basic controls and data visualization controls, including charts, gauges and grids. With DevExpress, developers can create engaging desktop, Web and mobile experiences that end users love.
Learn more at www.devexpress.com.
DevOps is transforming the way companies compete, but some organizations are not yet structured for it, are unable to automate tasks end to end, or have not yet fine-tuned their processes. CA Technologies (CA) is simplifying the transformation by providing a portfolio of organically developed and acquired tools that enable end-to-end automation and process efficiencies. Using CA’s unique and powerful combination of tools, organizations can deliver higher quality software faster. As an example, global banking and financial institution ING has been able to increase its number of monthly releases from 150 to more than 30,000 in just three short years.
“Companies want to embrace DevOps practices so they can benefit from the application economy,” said Aruna Ravichandran, VP of DevOps Marketing at CA. “Our tools enable customers to bring products to market rapidly. They can achieve Continuous Delivery while providing a phenomenal user experience.”
CA was named one of the 2015 SD Times 100 for its industry-leading contributions in the DevOps category. In the last year, the company has built and enhanced a number of products while making strategic acquisitions that benefit customers in every area of the software development life cycle, from planning to production.
CA’s DevOps leadership has been acknowledged by some of the top industry research firms, including Gartner, Forrester, and KuppingerCole. Ravichandran said CA is the only API Management vendor that was named a leader in their respective recent reports.
Simplify Release Automation
More companies want a reliable foundation for building a Continuous Delivery pipeline. CA Release Automation’s end-to-end design extends across multiple teams and technology silos connecting development, test, release and operations teams. Any combination of open-source, proprietary, CA or third-party tools can be automated as part of a single, comprehensive process that promotes a release from one environment to the next. In addition to streamlining the entire process, CA Release Automation enables effective communication and collaboration across the organization. Using CA Release Automation, software teams can minimize manual transitions and hand-offs, thereby reducing chaos, complexity, human errors, delays and rework. Molina Medicaid Solutions reduced its average deployment time by more than 90%. Spread betting and Contract for Difference (CFD) trading company City Index reduced its manual effort by 50%which accelerated software delivery by 25%.
Embrace Service Virtualization
Service virtualization enables development teams to quickly create, edit and deploy virtual services that simulate the systems, services, microservices or APIs they need. Instead of waiting for constrained resources to become available or waiting for another team to finish a component they need to move forward, virtual services can be used to avoid delays and stay productive. With CA Service Virtualization, software teams are building and testing applications much faster. And they’re able to “shift left,” completing development and test tasks earlier in the software cycle so applications can be delivered faster, infrastructure costs can be reduced, and overall application quality can be improved. DirecTV was able to reduce the time it takes to set up new development and test environments by 97%.
Manage APIs More Effectively
As more companies move toward Web API architectures and SaaS, they need to quickly convert complex application services into developer-friendly APIs that can be shared easily and securely. To do that, they need to construct, integrate, and maintain API policies efficiently without requiring a team of experts. CA API Management speeds up and simplifies API management so more can be accomplished, even with less-skilled resources. By combining CA’s Service Virtualization and API Management capabilities, virtual and physical services can be made available to development and test teams via a searchable, self-service catalog. Services that reside in the CA API Gateway are automatically replicated to CA Service Virtualization and synchronized after each new deployment for faster creation and simplified maintenance. With the API Gateway, customers are able to reduce development time and enable more agile business processes.
Optimize the Software Life Cycle
CA is actively acquiring complementary providers to fortify its product and service portfolios. The company recently announced its intention to acquire Agile development leader Rally Software and automated software testing leader Grid-Tools.
The Rally acquisition expands CA’s strengths in the DevOps and Management Cloud area, enabling developers to deliver new types of software experiences faster and more flexibly. It also underscores CA’s commitment to helping customers thrive in the application economy.
The Grid-Tools acquisition expands CA’s DevOps capabilities with an enhanced focus on quality acceleration. Rather than being mired in time-consuming manual testing and data-management tasks, enterprises can realize the potential of Agile development and Continuous Delivery. Importantly, organizations benefit from greater test coverage, faster test creation, and repeatable test execution of software assets while reducing the time and resources required to deliver software products.
Learn more at www.ca.com.
Software teams spend an inordinate amount of time customizing out-of-the-box document imaging components. To save time and enable higher-quality image capture and processing, developers choose Atalasoft.
“We provide serious document imaging capabilities. Our Document Imaging SDKs are built by developers for developers,” said Kevin Hulse, an associate solutions enablement specialist at Atalasoft, a Kofax Company (which was recently acquired by Lexmark).
Atalasoft made the 2015 SD Times 100 for its contributions to the APIs, Libraries and Frameworks category. In the last year, the company continued to enhance its DotImage and JoltImage document imaging products. It also launched MobileImage, a document imaging solution for iOS and Android devices.
For more than 12 years, Atalasoft has provided imaging libraries that help software developers build document scanning, viewing and processing into their applications. In addition to reducing development time, Atalasoft is recognized for lowering development costs by providing fixed-price, royalty-free licensing for many of its products. The company specializes in zero-footprint imaging technologies so applications built with its SDKs are competitive, easy to use, and 100% Web-based.
Atalasoft DotImage powers more than 2,000 document, ECM, and EMR applications built by ISVs, systems integrators, and enterprise developers that are used in the healthcare, financial services, legal, government, education, and manufacturing sectors. Its JoltImage product is the Java equivalent of DotImage. The company also offers Wingscan for Web scanning, and DotPDF, which generates PDFs.
Introducing MobileImage
Poor-quality images complicate processing. MobileImage captures and processes perfect document images from mobile devices. Its capture control provides developers with complete control of the device’s flash, focus and image stabilization capabilities, and it allows end users to instruct the device to wait until the image of the document is stable before capturing it. Once captured, the images are cleaned up using Atalasoft’s ImagePerfection process, prepared for OCR downstream, and reduced in size so they can be sent over cellular networks or downloaded in bulk. MobileImage also removes highlighting or image texture on a page to ensure that the printed text is clean and easy to submit to a workflow processing agent.
“The SDK provides controls to integrate with a camera so you can capture a quality image of a document and scan barcodes in real time,” said Hulse. “You can capture the image using your own camera controls or our controls, clean it up, and stream it to a server so work can be done on it.”
The barcode recognition allow barcodes to be read from a live camera feed. It can also read multiple barcodes with a single image.
Even More Robust Document Imaging
Atalasoft 10.6 is the latest version of the DotImage and JoltImage SDKs. DotImage has a set of JavaScript controls with an API to control and interact with multiple documents natively in any HTML5-enabled browser. The 10.6 release adds expanded support for formalized documents, and a new WebDocument viewer customized appearance options. It also supports digital signatures on PDFs.
“The PDF digital signing capabilities support the entire workflow,” said Hulse. “You can create a PDF signed with a certificate, verify that the PDF is signed, and set up the PDF so it can only be edited in ways required to progress through a workflow.”
Using the new OfficeDecoder, developers working with Word and Excel can now work with those files just like any other format Atalasoft supports.
In addition, the WebDocumentViewer control has been updated. It enables custom thumbnail layouts and custom annotations. The thumbnails can be laid out horizontally, vertically, or on any custom-sized grid. With WebDocumentViewer, TIFF, PDF and other image formats can be viewed in browsers.
Using annotations and server functions, documents can be routed and approved by the appropriate parties. DotImage and JoltImage include a set of controls that have annotations built directly into them so users can display a document and use annotations to streamline a workflow. Alternatively, documents can have annotations embedded inside of them to facilitate more effective collaboration. The 10.6 release allows custom annotations to be added to Atalasoft’s collection of annotations using SVG or custom-defined annotations.
DotImage and JoltImage include a set of image encoders and decoders that make image conversion easy. They open PDF, TIFF, JPG, PNG, RAW and other types images as if they were the same format. And, they remove the complexity of supporting multiple formats since all image formats are treated the same.
DotImage and JoltImage make it easy to rearrange document pages and combine functions with a single function call. They also facilitate the conversion of images into storable formats and enable efficient cleanup. Using the TWAIN scanning capabilities, desktop scans can be configured and started using an API. In addition, barcodes and other behaviors can automatically be divided into individual documents from a bulk scan. Learn more at www.atalasoft.com. n
Converting one business file format to another can be more challenging than it needs to be. Using Aspose APIs, developers can add Microsoft Office-like functionality to their applications and easily convert one file format to another.
“Aspose products are mature and offer a robust feature set while maintaining the highest quality,” said Justin Anderson, associate marketing director at Aspose. “There is no need for Microsoft Office to be installed since Aspose components are totally independent. They’re a pure .NET alternative to the Microsoft Office Object Model.”
More than 15,000 companies and 300,000 developers use Aspose APIs to add popular business document types to their applications. Aspose.Total, the most comprehensive package, includes every component Aspose offers. There are also platform-specific suites available for .NET, Java, Cloud, Android and SharePoint. Aspose also offers rendering extensions for Jasper Reports and SQL Services Reporting Services (SSRS). Using Aspose.Total, developers are adding Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Project, Visio, and OneNote capabilities, as well as bar code generation and reading, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and PDF, write, and read manipulation options to their applications. Customers also have the option of choosing product family packs such as Aspose.Cells, which includes Aspose.Cells for .NET, Java, Android, SharePoint, SSRS, and JasperReports.
Aspose is among the SD Times 100 for its continued contributions in the APIs, Libraries and Frameworks category.
Aspose.Total for .NET
Aspose has been one of the most trusted providers of .NET components since 2002. Over the years, it has expanded its .NET offerings while bringing much of the same functionality to other platforms.
Aspose.Total for .NET is a compilation of every .NET component Aspose offers. It includes Aspose.Cells, Aspose.Words, Aspose.Pdf, Aspose.Slides, Aspose.BarCode, Aspose.Tasks, Aspose.Email, Aspose.Diagram, Aspose.OCR, and Aspose.Imaging. The popular suite is compiled on a daily basis to ensure that it contains the most up-to-date versions of each Aspose .NET component. The same is true for all Aspose.Total suites.
Two of the most mature and most popular components are Aspose.Cells and Aspose.Words. Using Aspose.Cells for .NET, developers can create, modify, convert, render, and print Excel spreadsheets without requiring Microsoft Excel on the server. Aspose.Words is an advanced class library for .NET that enables developers to perform a wide range of document processing tasks directly within their .NET applications. It allows developers to generate, modify, convert, render and print documents without using Microsoft Word.
The latest version of Aspose.Cells for .NET includes a number of new features and enhancements that are worth noting. For example, new APIs were added to help the user who wishes to strategize the calculation precision handling on their own, according to the application’s requirements. The capability adds more flexibility and extensibility to the formula calculation engine. Row heights and ranges can now be calculated simultaneously and there is a new option that calculates the page setup scaling factor, like Microsoft Excel. Developers can also extract cell values with or without formatting applied.
The latest version of Aspose.Words includes a Public Chart API, a Public API for Custom Mark in footnotes, and a LINQ Reporting Engine that supports charts. HTML/MHTML with framesets is now preserved during open and save operations. Password verification is possible in write-protected documents. Aspose.Words also includes support for culture invariant languages in DOCX/WML and provides improved footnote handling, including support for paragraph rules and better positioning. Because the behavior of Word has changed, row collapsing has been updated. The clipping of shapes in nested table cells in documents generated by Word 2013 has also been improved. In addition, image filenames can be changed using ImageSavingCallback and printer metrics are now supported on the Windows platform.
“Developers may have a need to create an application that produces contracts in a PDF format,” said Anderson. “Using Aspose.Words, you can populate data into contract templates in Microsoft Word format and convert those Word documents into PDFs.”
Aspose for Cloud
Aspose for Cloud is a cloud-based document-generation, conversion and automation platform that interoperates seamlessly with other cloud services. Its REST APIs give developers total control over documents and file formats on all platforms. And, because it’s a cloud solution, there’s nothing to install.
Using Aspose for Cloud, Web and mobile app developers can easily work with Microsoft Word documents, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, Adobe PDFs, OpenDocument formats, barcodes, OCR and e-mail formats and protocols in their apps. Its REST API can be called from any platform including .NET, Java, Ruby, Salesforce, Amazon and many more. Developers use Aspose for Cloud to support many common document processing and management tasks in their apps such as document assembly, mail merge, reporting, file conversion, text and image extraction, metadata removal, barcode generation and recognition, e-mail tracking and creation, and targeting content to different devices.
Learn more at www.aspose.com.
In today’s digital world, every company is a software company. Businesses are investing heavily in software so they can transform their analog or hybrid business models into newer, more effective digital models. With HP Application Delivery Management solutions, organizations can accelerate software delivery to deliver at a speed that matches customer demand, create optimized user experiences across multiple OS and devices and optimize their apps to handle modern load, performance and security challenges.
“HP is the world leader in automated software quality,” said Raffi Margaliot, senior vice president and general manager of Application Delivery Management for HP Software. “Customers trust us to provide the most comprehensive portfolio for testing and delivering applications in the new style of IT.”
HP made the 2015 SD Times 100 list for its contributions to the QA, Security and Performance category. Using its solutions, software teams are delivering better-quality software faster that performs reliably in production, allowing business to differentiate.
Accelerate Development
Organizations everywhere are transitioning from Waterfall processes to Agile processes in order to be more responsive to change and accelerate development. Now, many companies are embracing DevOps to accelerate delivery and business innovation. As they move to Agile and DevOps, HP helps them overcome the challenges of rapid delivery.
“Part of it is a process issue and part of it is a tool issue, but at the end of the day, our customers aspire to move much faster than they did before,” said Margaliot. “Not all of them are going to embrace continuous deployment like Facebook with deployments in production a day, but they are trying to move toward continuous delivery to meet market demands more effectively.”
HP Application Lifecycle Manager (ALM) and HP Agile Manager help software teams extend their ALM and Agile processes into DevOps by leveraging the power of Big Data to enable predictive ALM. Using analytics and machine learning, software teams can finally comprehend the vast amount of information buried in source-code-management systems, test-management systems, production logs and production monitoring data. Using HP ALM and HP Agile Manager, it is possible to predict risk, timelines and application quality throughout the application life cycle.
“HP ALM brings development and operations teams together, lowering silos and increasing collaboration,” said Margaliot. “We’re feeding far more information from the operations side than developers have had access to before so they can develop and test their applications according to the real usage on the production side.”
Anytime, Anywhere Reliability
The simple days of supporting just Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer are long gone. Now, software teams have to ensure that their applications run everywhere: on popular browsers, including Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox; on operating systems, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and iOS and Android; and on various form factors, including tablets, smartphones, watches, glasses and the Internet of Things.
“Our customers are facing challenges testing every part of an application given the growing environmental complexity,” said Margaliot. “HP Mobile Center helps our customers build a mobile app that automatically tests every application on every form factor, operating system and browser—and every change that is being introduced without compromising time to market.”
The testing capabilities also extend to the sensors on modern mobile devices. By monitoring the sensors that are participating in an application—including GPS, camera, video, oscillator, accelerometer, compass, gyroscope, and barometer—software teams can test very complicated scenarios. The capability is especially helpful for customers who are moving past mobile applications to the Internet of Things.
Master Performance and Load Testing
Web and mobile applications are driving exponentially more traffic than they have historically. In the past, bank customers would check their bank balances maybe twice a month, usually after their paycheck arrived. In the mobile era, the same customers are now using apps to check bank balances more frequently, if not daily. “Higher user engagement requires much more scalability and reliability on the back end,” said Margaliot. “Whether it’s Black Friday or other peak load times, e-commerce and other consumer-facing sites need to support massive amounts of traffic coming from mobile devices.”
Often performance failures are highly visible, such as when the Affordable Healthcare Act became effective and the Healthcare.gov site crashed because it was unable to handle the volume of traffic.
“The problem was a lack of performance testing,” said Margaliot. “It was the first time performance testing issues became the subject of a congressional hearing.”
Using HP performance and load testing solutions such as StormRunner Load and Network Virtualization, companies can avoid the cost and angst of site outages and mobile app failures.
In the future, HP will further help customers in their journey to DevOps using Big Data and predictive analytics. It will also introduce new solutions for testing the problems the Internet of Things will introduce.”
Learn more at www.hp.com.
The world of software development has been changing at a rapid pace. Testing practices and processes, though, have struggled to keep up. That’s because the rigorous standards testers apply to software don’t work in a “We need it out the door NOW” environment. The battle of quality vs. time-to-market has never been as pitched as it is today.
Some think that because of Agile development practices, it’s acceptable to ship buggy software, because shorter feedback loops and development cycles mean that defects can be corrected in days or weeks, rather than the year or so they’d live in the wild under “waterfall” practices—if they weren’t deemed worthy of an immediate patch.
But that defect, even corrected quickly, might already have irreparably damaged your company’s reputation, as dissatisfied customers take to social media to vent about your slow or locked-up application, or about a web page that doesn’t load, or—dare we say it? —the dreaded 404. Was the problem in your code? Was it in an outside service your application calls? Was it due to the load the cloud infrastructure provider had to bear for your application and so many others?
Add to that the need to test software for delivery to all kinds of devices—smartphones, tablets and wearable devices, to name a few, along with the usual laptops and desktops—and the need for an excellent customer experience, and we see that testing is not less important—in fact, it is more important than ever before.
In today’s world, testing has to be a first-class citizen in the development cycle. Test-driven development is one technique for heading problems off before they occur. Testing, of course, requires tools. Some organizations have created their own tools and processes. Others turn to the vibrant marketplace for tools for testing mobile applications, or doing load testing, or static code analysis.
Which tool or methodology is best? The one that works best for your organization. Testing is too important to be left for last, or to be done by a QA team that’s been isolated from the development process. Today, it’s imperative to build testing into the process, from architecture and requirements to deployment and maintenance.
We hope you enjoy this special supplement to SD Times.
It takes a test tube of innovation, a beaker of leadership and a graduated cylinder of “buzz” to create the chemistry required to be the software industry’s best. And that’s who the editors of SD Times have recognized for 2014.
Judged by the editors of SD Times each spring, the SD Times 100 recognizes the companies that have shown they have shaped these elements of success in ways that are unique and compelling. Now in its 12th year, the SD Times 100 has grown to become one of the most respected resources for development managers and technology executives.
In these pages, we talk to several of the leaders about their products, their achievements, where they are and where they see themselves going. Their stories are often fascinating, and we urge you to visit their websites and take their solutions for a test-drive.
As you look over the list, we’d like to hear from you. Did we hit the mark? Did we disappoint? So, enjoy this special supplement to SD Times, and mark your calendars: Nominations for the 2015 SD Times 100 will open on March 1!
Technology races ahead, and developers are left holding the bag of maintaining older applications on multiple platforms, creating new apps for new platforms, and working with the complexities of numerous different technologies. Why, it’s enough to drive a developer to drink (Red Bulls, that is)!
In the Microsoft sphere alone, you have Visual Studio, the .NET Framework, ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC, and every developer these days needs to be able to work in jQuery, HTML5 and perhaps even native iOS or Android. Not to mention, applications based on such oldies but goodies as Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight need to either be kept in excellent working order, or migrated onto newer platforms.
Meanwhile, companies want their workers to be able to access enterprise data from any device in the field, and those workers expect the experience to be the same as the one they get when they’re on a high-performance consumer application.
All this means one thing: The use of components, tools and frameworks for the creation of applications is perhaps more important than it ever has been.
In the Microsoft universe, numerous third-party solutions exist for plug-ins, quality-assurance services and much more. This special Supplement to SD Times, “The 2014 .NET Component Buyers Guide & Visual Studio Sourcebook,” will introduce you to the leading solutions providers in the Microsoft ecosystem.
The combination of Microsoft’s Visual Studio and the .NET Framework, together with third-party reusable components, creates an unbeatable combination for enterprise developers and independent software vendors supporting the Microsoft platform.
