The visual theme support introduced by Windows XP will make your shiny new .NET application look a lot more attractive. But your competitors enjoy exactly the same benefits with their software. What can you do differently to make your program stand out head and shoulders above the rest?

XtraEditors Library 3.06 from Developer Express offers a comprehensive and – for what you get – reasonably low cost solution. It’s basically a rich library of mostly custom data editing controls, all of which are written in C#, meaning that you don’t need any external DLLs, OCX files or other ugliness. Because full source code is available, you can optionally build the controls right into your application, making a fully self-contained solution.

The data editor controls include a drop-down calculator as well as colour, time and date editors. A key benefit of all the controls is that they can easily be embedded into a grid such as the XtraVerticalGrid or the XtraGrid suite, both of which are also available from Developer Express. If you buy these packages, you’ll get XtraEditors Library included for free.

Another cool feature of the controls is that they’re ‘skinnable’. In other words, low-level elements of each control such as embedded buttons, scrollbars and column dividers are built up from custom bitmaps that you supply. This can be used to create some sophisticated and funky effects; see the website for examples of what’s possible.

A lot of attention to detail is apparent in the design of XtraEditors Library. As is usually the case with Developer Express, they have the knack of incorporating a lot of goodies into their offerings without allowing ‘rampant features’ to obscure basic functionality. As an example, numeric and date/time edit controls have a new mask mode that allows you to specify a custom mask for representing data entry and data display. You can even specify a POSIX-compatible regular expression to control the format of data entered by the user.

XtraEditors Library 3.06 introduces eight new controls, including a stylish message box replacement and is fully compatible with the current Beta 2 release of Whidbey (VS.NET 2005). It includes pre-built demos, tutorials, and full help documentation that integrate automatically into VS.NET.