I can’t begin to tell everyone how happy I have been with their controls.

Actipro has several controls, my favorite are the Syntax Editor, Tab Strip Control, Dock Manager. If you want an application that looks and feels like VS.NET 2005, then these are the set of controls to get.

What have I done with them, well I’m using Syntax Editor for the code entry all over the place in my components as well as in my IDE (www.connectblocks.com). This has been an invaluable control, without it I would have had to build one and that would have taken a very long time. Plus it wouldn’t have half the great features and the features are not stopping any time soon. I’m as excited as a little boy in Disney World at some of the upcoming changes. One of which is how to describe a language. This control is also being used in some of the more popular components and you might not even know it. Have you used www.codesmithtools.com ?

Next on my list is the dockmanager, I was previously using the free Magic Library for my docking windows. That one was nice, but Actirpo’s  is miles ahead. Actipro’s documanager and tabstrip controls I can set different themes as to how they look (has several built in themes). It also does the position graph on the screen when you move a window around. What makes the dockmanager stick out from many of its competition is the simple fact that you can setup the dockmanager at designtime via the designer. That’s right, no code entry!  Next is the tabstrip control, just like the dockmanager, it has theme support and is completely able to setup the control at designtime via the designer as well. Plus since its 100% .NET (unlike the TabControl MS gives (com wrapped)) you have more control over how it looks and runs.

What is Actipro doing next, well besides the improvements on these controls above, they are coming out with a Menu and toolbar that will just make heads roll when it comes out, I personally await their release as a little boy that waits for Summer break, it just can’t get here fast enough.

Personally what I feel makes Actipro standout from the rest is the personal interaction one receives, many larger companies just feel so out of touch from their users. This one time I was very disappointed with ComponentOne, they had a certain interface that looked exactly the same (how you setup the columns), this was for both the Datagrid and Combobox they provided. The problem lays in the fact that the interface didn’t work the same, looked and felt the same, but one behaved differently then the other (combobox at designtime produced errors) though this was a while back and they probably fixed it by now. Why I’m even saying anything about this is the fact that when I brought it up I was put down about it. Saying how that it’s a different control and this is to be expected and that you just have to do things differently in both. Well no mater, you don’t, I repeat DON’T make an interface and design look exactly the same as another and then make it behave different. There comes an established  view once you work with controls in a company, you then expect to be able on similar items to do things the same, who can remember these details of something that looks exactly the same as another but has this one little quark? Hence their support was very lacking!

For all of Actipro’s support over the past year I could not be thankful enough, keep up the good work.

For more information check out

www.actiprosoftware.com