Who says graphs need to be limited to bars, lines, areas, triangles and pies?
And who says they need to be display-only? Dundas Gauge for .NET lets developers
add great looking gadgets like dials, graduated bars and knobs that users can
interact with in their applications. These gadgets can be used for applications
like KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your CEO and on screens used to
configure what-if scenarios for the management.
These come as sets of components having full integration with Visual
Studio.NET 2005, including smart tags, F1-help and debugging support. The gauges
can be real-time, circular, linear, numeric and interactive. They can also be
combined with one another in a hierarchical fashion, letting the values on one
gauge influence the value on another (maybe different type of) gauge. For
instance, a linear gauge may setup values for another circular gauge.
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Or a circular gauge may become a sub-gauge for a larger circular gauge. The
setup of a gauge is done in three steps: select the type of gauge and
instantiate the correct control on the display UI; set up the parameters for
this control and finally add the data points (either by data binding or
manually). Data binding can happen with anything for which there is a .NET
provider and exposes an IEnumerable interface.
Gauges also support history with playback facility. And the depth of this
history can be setup dynamically or programmatically. Playback means the data
displayed using the gauge for the last so many instances of data is displayed
again using another UI. For instance, a circular speedometer gauge displays the
live data while a running line or bar chart progressively displays the
historical information. Knobs, another control in the Gauge package, are used to
collect user input. This control again has history capability that can be played
back.
These can be used in an application like a What-If analyzer to set up
parameters being analyzed and act as inputs to other kinds of gauges and graphs
on the screen. For maximum visual effect, the developer can take advantage of
graphics capabilities exposed by the different containers in the Dundas package.
These let the developer add anti-aliasing, embossing, color gradients, pattern
fills, rotation, image based themes and 3D perspectives to his graph.
The gauges are readily interactive with a minimal amount of coding and feature 'playback' of activity over a configurable time period |
Bottom Line: An excellent addition to a developer's toolkit with
real enterprise applications.
Sujay V Sarma