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ILOG Displays New .NET Tool
Longtime Java vendor issues dashboard-diagramming tool for .NET
Component vendor ILOG Inc. has released the first .NET version of its Diagrammer software. In July, the company debuted Diagrammer for .NET, a tool to help developers build dashboards or interactive diagrams for Business Activity Monitoring.
Typically, designers work on the graphic elements and then developers import the vector-based files into a visualization tool like Diagrammer to animate the displays. "When you're looking at a business process, that's typically a diagram, but for innovative companies, it's becoming interactive and not static," says Ed Kir‡ly, ILOG's visualization product manager.
Diagrammer, which works with Visual Studio 2005, ports the concepts from the company's longstanding Java visualization product to .NET 2.0. But unlike the Java tool, this version supports Windows Forms and Web Forms application development in a single tool.
The .NET software is targeted at C# developers. It supports ASP.NET AJAX technology and offers a software development kit and pre-built diagram editors.
The dashboard tool is used to program custom logic, visualize real-time data and animate charts and graphs.
The diagram display tool connects objects to create static and interactive diagrams for use in UML modeling tools, flow or org charts, business process workflows or Web analysis tools. It includes pre-built diagram editors for UML class diagrams and Business Process Modeling Notation, as well as a generic diagram designer.
Independent software vendors often rebrand the pre-built editors, according to Kir‡ly. Licensing is about $5,000 for developers and $20,000 for deployment.
Diagrammer marks the second in a series of ILOG products planned for Windows/.NET developers. The first was ILOG Gantt for .NET, a charting tool. "The Gantt product gave us a lot of experience about how to integrate with these environments and .NET," explains Kir‡ly, who says the company's products are "gradually moving to .NET."
ILOG plans to support Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5, and eventually plug into Microsoft's PowerShell. The company, headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., and Paris, also offers business rules-management software and graphical components for C++ and Java.
About the Author
Kathleen Richards is the editor of RedDevNews.com and executive editor of Visual Studio Magazine.