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Bring Your Data to Life
by Andy Clark
September 2, 2005
Graphics Server .NET provides an outstanding set of tools for adding graphs to your VS.NET applications. These tools work within both WinForms and ASP.NET, and they support a large variety of graphs with an object-oriented API that is both powerful and easy to use. Version 2.5 adds support for widgets and other graphics devices that take charting well beyond the presentation graphics arena (see Figure 1).
Graphics Server .NET supports all of the standard graphs, including pie, line, area, bar, and Gantt charts. Most of these charts have both 2-D and 3-D versions. It also supports radar, scatter, polar, and a variety of other graphs you might not have heard of. All of these graphs are implemented with the developer in mind. You can control fonts, scales, captions, and overall style. Further, you can easily set the graphs to show lines at set standard deviations from the norm, a common requirement for quality measurements. You can also color-code unusual values automatically. You can configure these features at design time using Graphics Server's Chart, Layout, and Style designers. The WinForms version of Graphics Server .NET also provides property pages that allow users to modify chart characteristics at run time without any additional developer code.
Graphics Server .NET 2.5 goes beyond presentation graphics to support widgets, which are special devices such as thermometers, meters, gauges, and sliders that you can use for dashboards or as special controls. These devices support a rich event interface so that you can allow users to modify data directly using widgets. The devices can also help users make quick observations about important status variables.
Note that there is strong support for event-based development throughout Graphics Server .NET. As you would expect, some events are available in the WinForms version, but not the ASP.NET version. However, the ASP.NET version provides tools for managing the large number of images that can pile up on a Web site. Graphics Server draws a new image and stores it on your Web site whenever a user creates a new graph. Graphics Server provides properties to prevent these image files from building up.
Graphics Server's support is both responsive and knowledgeable, and the product documentation is excellent. It features both introductory and reference documentation and lots of sample code for both C# and VB.NET. All of this is integrated into a Resource Center that does a good job of showcasing what is possible with the product's amazing variety of graphs.
Graphics Server is an impressive product that supports many different graphs in ASP.NET and WinForms, as well as custom-developed graph types. It's easy to use and strongly supported. I would like to see a document that clearly delineates what requires additional scripting in ASP.NET, but you can deduce most of the differences between WinForms and ASP.NET with a little common sense. Graphics Server .NET is a strong tool for helping your users understand and manage their data.
Graphics Server .NET 2.5
Graphics Server Technologies
Web: www.graphicsserver.com
Phone: 800-231-1293; 206-625-6900
Price: $2,999 (site license)
Quick Facts: Adds support for a variety of graphs to WinForms and ASP.NET.
Pros: Supports a wide variety of graphs with lots of flexibility.
Cons: Documentation doesn't clarify which functions require additional scripting within ASP.NET.
About the Author
Andy Clark is a consultant with iGate Inc. in Richmond, Va. He holds PMP, MCSD, and SJCP certifications. Reach him at .
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