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Infragistics talk components
Matt Nicholson talks to director of engineering Steve Dadoly and marketing director Adam Jaffe about the Infragistics product range, the state of the software component market, the effect of Visual Studio 2005 and the future of presentation layer development.
Author: Matt Nicholson
Last updated: Dec 2005
Matt: First of all, tell me about the Infragistics product line. Adam: Our flagship product is the NetAdvantage toolset which is made up of Windows Forms, ASP.NET, Tablet PC and COM controls. We offer NetAdvantage on a subscription basis that is very similar to the MSDN subscription. We release new Volumes of the product three times a year, in the first weeks of February, June and October. Infragistics’ WebSchedule control is part of the NetAdvantage toolset. Matt: Over the past five years, have you seen a move towards subscriptions? Adam: Our renewal rate is around 60 percent, which I believe is similar to that of MSDN, so the majority of customers continue to renew. I definitely see subscriptions remaining popular and continuing to increase as more enterprise-level organisations adopt .NET technology. Matt: Is TestAdvantage being integrated with Visual Studio Team System (VSTS)? Steve: Mercury is working on a new version of QuickTest Professional for the beginning of 2006 that will integrate with VSTS. Our add-in will also work with VSTS, just because of the way that all the pieces fit together. Inside the box Steve: As far as the ‘black box’ thing goes, I think there are still a lot of customers that buy a component, snap it in and use it. They don’t care how it works, they’re just happy that it does. But there are a growing number of customers who really want to extend what they do with our tools, and there are several ways they can do it. We have the PLF, or Presentation Layer Framework, which is very extensible. The PLF is built on an inheritance hierarchy and there are many properties that can be set. You can also build custom editors that you can plug into it. Matt: Do you supply the source code as standard to all subscription customers? Steve: Yes, although not for the COM components. I think customers are now demanding source code. They want to be able to debug their applications right into the code if they need to. The debugger is so great in .NET now that people want to be able to step all the way through and see what’s going on. They want to use it as a learning tool to understand how things have been done and they want to have it as an insurance policy so that, no matter what happens in the future, they still have the ability to do what they need to do. Adam: One thing that we find has become more prevalent since the release of .NET is that developers are very clear about what they need to be able to do their job easily. They want to be trusted. They want access to the source code. They don’t want to have to activate products, so we got rid of our product activation four years ago. They may need to install a product on three machines, depending on what job they’re working on, so they don’t want a complex licensing model. They want to know that the final application is being deployed within the proper licensing guidelines and that they’re not doing anything illegal. We try and make it easy with no deployment fees. Steve: Training has been huge for us. We just introduced it this year and we’re having trouble keeping up with the demand. People want to understand the power of the tools, and they want to be able to get up and go quickly. In the enterprise, training is just part of the game. Visual Studio 2005 Steve: With regards to the benefits of .NET 2.0 over .NET 1.0 and .NET 1.1, I would say better integration with Visual Studio, a better design time experience for developers and a richer object model in .NET 2.0. Visual Studio 2005 is a lot easier to use: it’s a lot more approachable for new users; a lot more powerful for the power user; and for the real high-end enterprise, developers finally have all the pieces they need to really build those large apps that they’ve wanted to do with .NET. I think it will unleash the floodgates for .NET development. Working with ‘Avalon’ Steve: For the last couple of years we’ve been working closely with Microsoft on WPF. We previewed what we call the DataPresenter and the DataVisualizer at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference 2005 in Los Angeles. Windows Presentation Foundation technology allows Infragistics to display data in new ways. Matt: How does XAML fit in here? Steve: The way it’s working for us is that the developers work in C#, for the most part, and the designers work in the XAML code. With a WPF component you have a framework that defines the behaviour of the control, but the visual styling – how it looks on the screen, how it animates and so on – is controlled by the XAML. XAML allows you to change how the component’s going to look without having to change any of the underlying code. It separates presentation from functionality. Matt: How are the designers generating the XAML? Steve: Right now there are no tools so they’re doing it the hard way - writing XML with Notepad. It’s very painful, but we do have a quick way to build and view the result immediately, so they can see what they’re doing. We can’t wait until Microsoft’s Expression tools ship! Matt: So it effectively lubricates the interface between developers and designers? Steve: Incredibly. I’ve been in software development a long time and I can’t tell you how excited I am about this particular area.
The product is offered as NetAdvantage with Subscription and Priority Support for $995 for the first year, followed by $695 to renew each year. This entitles the customer to ‘front of queue’ developer support through telephone or e mail. We also offer NetAdvantage with a Subscription only for $795 followed by $395 a year, which includes standard support. All subscribers have access to the source code for all the Windows Forms and ASP.NET controls.
We also sell the product alone for $495, which buys you just the current volume at the time and does not include source code. There are no runtime deployment fees.
Currently about 60 percent of our customers are Subscription only, another 20 percent with Priority support and about 20 percent buy the product only. A number of people who initially buy ‘product only’ step up to one of the subscription packages later.
One of the reasons our subscriptions are popular is because they keep customers up-to-date with the latest presentation layer technology. If there’s something new and hot in the market, then our customers know that our next release is likely to support it. 
We also have a product called TestAdvantage. Last December, working in partnership with the testing tools company Mercury, we released a .NET add-in to their QuickTest Professional product which allows you to test applications built with NetAdvantage Windows Forms controls. TestAdvantage is sold on a subscription basis. There are three releases a year and it’s offered in ‘per tester’ seats of 5 and 10.
Matt: How has the third-party component market changed since the introduction of .NET? Before .NET, components were largely sold as 'black box' plug-ins. Are customers now more likely to expect source code?
You can also inherit from our controls. Not a lot of people do that because our controls are fairly rich, but some do use our grid to create grids of their own that support features specific to their application or their enterprise. But we keep adding functionality so that people don’t have to do so much customisation – they can use the product right out of the box without a lot of mucking around.
It’s been a very smart move for us to release source code. Instead of building a black box to protect our intellectual property, we’re now focusing on staying ahead by being really agile and smart about what we do, and providing all the things that are needed to support a professional development organisation.
When you sell subscriptions you develop a relationship with your customers – it’s not a one-off purchase any more. Also, it’s not just the mass market right now as there’s a huge push in the enterprise for .NET. Selling enterprise licences is a different type of business. It’s a longer selling cycle and supporting the customer is more complicated. Different mechanisms need to be in place to handle that kind of relationship.
Matt: What do you see as the main benefits of Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0 over earlier versions?
My team’s been waiting for Visual Studio 2005 to be able to unleash all kinds of creative ideas on improving the design time experience for our customers. The plumbing is now there that was not in the earlier versions of Visual Studio .NET. The first release of our controls for Visual Studio 2005 will have Designer Regions, Smart Tags, Snap Lines and lots of little visual clues to help people program faster and better.
Matt: Looking ahead, what do you see as important in the coming XAML and Windows Presentation Foundation [formerly codenamed ‘Avalon’] technologies that will affect developers and companies such as yourselves?
The DataPresenter is a grid on steroids – it has all the features of a grid but it also has other features that are not possible unless you’re on the WPF platform. It’s easier to use and easier to understand your data, thanks to the way that WPF presents it. We have a demo on our Web site that really shows how you could do a business app with a little bit of extra finish and styling to make it beautiful and effective.
At Infragistics, WPF has allowed us to bring both the design team and the developers into the same Agile process. The designers work on the visual aspects of the product and the developers work on the framework, but they’re checking in and out of one source code control system. 
One of the great things is that the designers are not touching the C# code at all. When they can’t style the app the way they want with XAML, they go and talk to the developers.
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