![]() We’re in beta now with a handful of components, but we’ll get up to 100s of components available.” We have to do more work with touch, and we want to maintain performance. ![]() “We’re moving hundreds of our HTML and XAML components to WinJS and WinRT XAML. “It translates well now, it did not translate well in the beginning,” Guida says, referring to the early previews. How well does the XAML in Infragistics components, built for WPF and Silverlight, translate to XAML on the Windows Runtime, for Windows 8 store apps? “They’re against a lot of headwind of momentum and popularity, but because Microsoft is such an enterprise company, they are going to be successful.” Guida adds that Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 are “great innovation”, mentioning features like Live Tiles and people hub social media aggregation, which has application in business as well. We have a codebase of XAML that covers both WPF and Silverlight.” We’re going to continue to support Silverlight, because it makes sense for us. “Silverlight, nobody was really happy about that, but Microsoft made that decision. These companies are making a multi-year investment decision on WPF, where the life of the application if 5 years plus. We’ve brought some of our enterprise customers to Microsoft to show them that, some of the largest banks in the world, the insurance industry, the retail industry. The enterprise has not shifted aware from WPF. “ may have shifted the focus away from Silverlight and WPF, but the enterprise hasn’t, in terms of WPF. What about Windows 8, does he think Microsoft has got it right? Guida’s first reaction to my question is to state that the traditional Windows platform is by no means dead. It’s still a bigger market, but the next phase is around mobility.” “There’s still a huge market doing ASP.NET, Windows Forms, WPF. We need to reach the iPad, and more than the iPad as well.” “People are looking at mobility strategy and how to support BYOD, all these different platforms, and a lot of our conversations are around IgniteUI. “The whole market’s in transition,” he says. I asked Guida how the new mobile markets compared to the traditional Windows platform, for Infragistics as a component vendor. Other products include Nuclios, a set of native iOS components for developers, and IguanaUI for Android. Infragistics is building on what appears to be a growing trend: businesses which run Microsoft on the server, but are buying in iPads as mobile clients. Infragistics has also moved into the business iOS market, with SharePlus for SharePoint access on an iPad, and ReportPlus for reporting from SQL Server or SharePoint to iPad clients. “The majority of the market is looking at doing hybrid apps because it is so expensive to do native,” Guida told me. Guida particularly wanted to talk about IgniteUI, a set of JQuery controls which developers use either for web applications or for mobile web applications wrapped as native with PhoneGap/Cordova. In other words, this is a company with roots in the Microsoft developer platform, though for a few years now it has been madly diversifying in order to survive in the new world of mobile. Infragistics was formed in 2000 when Sheridan merged with another company, ProtoView. Windows developers with long memories will remember Sheridan software, who created products including Data Widgets and VBAssist. I spoke to Dean Guida, CEO at Infragistics, maker of components for Windows, web and mobile development platforms.
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