Welcome to Albamond XamlWebControls

Introduction

In times of "Rapid Application Developement" everyone has come to love the idea of Controls, in the sense that they are a way to save time and ease the process of developing. Most Controls provide some new functionality or format aspects, but there are still a few issues in modern webdesign that you are left to deal with on your own, and many of these are of the visual kind. Producing a visually enjoyable user interface with something like shadows or uncommon buttons is something everyone wants but only adept programmers are able to achieve, and even they are forced to use complex workarounds for certain problems now and then. Our XamlWebControls Set is the answer to these needs. The idea of Controls is to shield the user from the complexity of the underlying software infrastructure. XamlWebControls consist of several UI elements that provide solutions for the daily needs of a Web Developer. No more giant pixels when zooming, no more patchwork solutions when going for round edges etc...have a look at a few of our XamlWebControls and experience the advantage they will give you!

What are XamlWebControls?

The Xaml Web Control Set is a bunch of ASP.NET Controls that consume XAML, perform a server-side rendering and display the outcome in the browser. Create and handle professionally looking graphical UI Elements like Buttons, Panels, Tabs, etc. without leaving your Visual Studio Project.

Why use XAML/WPF in ASP.NET?

The goal: Make use of WPF - the most powerful and impressive Grafik API for Windows based systems so far - directly in ASP.NET.

Learn WPF instead of using a Paint Program.
No more messing around with semi-transparent Images - take advantage of full transparency features in WPF.
Benefit from several Bitmap effects already built into WPF to enhance existing UI elements with ease (Shadow, Glow, Edge, etc.). Image sizes don't matter anymore - resize UI elements as desired - and the rendering will take care of everything else.
Save money by changing graphical UI elements on your own and in the xaml-code, no more paying a graphical artist time and again. Instead of buying pixel based Images, get vector based XAML as a format understandable for both graphic designers and Web Developers.
Take advantage of existing XAML Design Tools (e.g. the Microsoft Expression Suite) for creating XAML based UI Elements on your own.
Dynamically scale images or UI elements to perfectly fit clients resolutions.

Why use XamlWebControls?

You could render the XAML directly into Bitmaps yourself. If this solution suffices for you, you may go for it. But there are several reasons for wrapping XAML rendering into our XamlWebControls:

XAML image rendering is wrapped into conventient Controls that take the "dirty rendering work" off your hands.
Excess Memory consumption and memory leaks are automatically taken care of (yes, they also exist in WPF in certain funtionalities) by rendering in isolated AppDomains.
The Controls automatically take care of rendering HTML that supports full transparancy - even in IE6!
You can declare small, element-based manipulations (e.g. a Label) of XAML directly in ASPX. This gives you the bit of extra flexibility a static bitmap can never provide!
Automatic extensive caching is performed on certain levels (Server Memory, Browser Cache) to optimize performance.
XamlWebControls can conserve rendered images on Harddrive in order to reduce redering needs even more.
All XAML rendering can be performed at design time, so you could deploy static pre-rendered XAML based elements on a WebServer without .NET Framework 3.0.

Why not use Silverlight directly?

Whenever you require videos or animations, you should use Silverlight (or Flash). But if your goal is to create professional looking state-of-the-art and accessible Web Sites, Silverlight has several disadvantages:

Silverlight is available on many but not all browsers or mobile clients.
XAML support in Silverlight is limited compared to WPF. (BitmapEffect-declarations for example cannot be done with Silverlight).
Silverlight must be installed on the clients, which puts the user in need of administrator rights to be able to perform the Silverlight installation.