I read many blogs of fellow .NET developers and recently this page came to my attention (through their blog). It's an offer of a free DotNetMagic developer's license in exchange for a blog post covering new .NET UI library released by Component Factory.

Component Factory is a new name in the field of .NET UI controls development. Their first release, Krypton Toolkit, is a collection of UI WinForms controls for .NET 2 and Visual Studio 2005. It's free for commercial use and so I think quite a few people would be interested in checking it out. Controls are actually quite good (considering they are free) and allow developers to reproduce MS Office look (mostly Outlook with it's paneled layout) in the applications. Controls also support visual customization.

You can download controls by navigating to Component Factory downloads page. They do ask you to submit your e-mail and you will be automatically subscribed to the e-mail newsletter (you can opt out at any moment).

I have being considering if I should write a post about this or not. On one hand I felt that this would be an advertisement, and people usually don't like reading advertisements. On the other hand the component is free and in all likelihood I could have talked about it sooner or later. This way I get a nice bonus and I will be able to improve the look of .NET applications that I work on, some of which I plan to release... So why not?:)