In the past week I've gotten a couple of emails about companies that are releasing components for the .NET Framework/Windows Presentation Foundation. Infragistics, the big component vendor, was the first announcing a series of components for WPF and ASP.NET AJAX. One of the more interesting components for WPF is XamChart. XamChart is an entire set of charting components that allows the developer to create both 2D charts and 3D charts. They've also released a component called XamRibbon which puts some of the functionality of the famous Ribbon menuing from Office 2007 into the hands of developers. The new components add to an already impressive array of Infragistics components for WPF which include a DataGrid and custom editors. [More Info]
The second announcement came from IdentityMine which has partnered with Conchango to offer an enterprise license of their Blendables Essentials Mix. Blendables is a series of components that came out of some of the custom development work that Identity Mine is doing. They've got a ton of WPF talent and for the most part the Blendables Essentials Mix consists of things that the developers have used over and over again and decided to make available to the public. With the Conchango deal they now have a good distribution model that should reach more developers.
Both of these shops are Microsoft-heavy but the speed with which they jumped into the component market for RIAs is a good thing. What's also interesting is that both companies are looking at ways to use the components they release for WPF as Silverlight components. Silverlight could benefit a ton from the large number of components that will be built for WPF. The component story is probably the first of many instances where the synergy between Silverlight and WPF make for easy enhancements to the other's platform.
