Component Vendors on Channel 9

I organized and ran my first developer lab at our Platform Adoption Center (otherwise known as building 20) in early March. We had quite a few component vendors in attendance. Our work was focused on helping the vendors ensure that their components are compatible with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2, and we had a number of product team members there to help. The guys from Channel 9 were kind enough to visit, and they shot some short video segments:

• Daniel Jebarat, Vice President of Syncfusion (authors of the fantastic Windows Forms FAQ) shows off some of their controls in a 12-minute video, including their Essential Grid, Essential Chart, Essential Diagram, and a fully managed C# HTML rendering engine called Essential HTMLUI.
• Michael J. Baldwin, President of Dart Communications, is interviewed in a 16-minute video where he talks about the technology behind their PowerWEB Live Controls for ASP.NET. If you're familiar with AJAX, this technology achieves the same results.
• Stephen Dadoly and Tony Lombardo of Infragistics talk about how their WebGrid uses asynchronous callbacks to load and display only the data you need in their 10-minute video. They also talk about some of the new features of Visual Studio 2005, including editable regions in the designer and the ability to embed JavaScript and image resouces in their controls.
• There's also a 9-minute video with Raghavendra Prabhu where he talks about the Windows Forms designer. Interesting stuff.

Developer labs are great resources for not only our customers and partners, but also for us. Because lab attendees work side-by-side with the people building our products, we get extremely valuable feedback that can be incorporated into our products. This is just one of the many ways we validate that our technology can be used in very real-world scenarios.