Here at Visual Studio Magazine, we hadn't reviewed a component suite for a long time, so we decided it was about time to look at this important area of the Visual Studio toolspace. In our May issue,
we published a review
of a new suite from
Telerik
, in part because Telerik's suites have earned top billing in our Reader's Choice awards on a number of occasions. The company also recently released new versions of all of its control suites.
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 05/25/20101 comments
In my last blog entry (Two Questions with Stephen Forte), I introduced Stephen Forte, chief strategy officer at component maker Telerik and asked him two questions about what the industry looks like from the perspective of someone in the business. This blog looks at the other two questions I asked about how Telerik competes in the competitive .NET toolspace.
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 05/24/20100 comments
A few weeks ago, I got to talk (via e-mail) with Stephen Forte, who is chief strategy officer of component maker Telerik. I was interested in two sets of questions: One about what the industry looks like from the perspective of someone in the business, and the other about how Telerik competes in that market.
This blog entry focuses on two questions I wanted to ask about the industry in general:
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 05/21/20100 comments
The last topic that I wanted to look at, as part of the extended review/commentary on
Nevron Diagram for .NET
, was retrieving objects from a diagram. That ability is critical if users are allowed to create their own diagrams in a form (which would also require using more of the controls in the Diagram for .NET toolbox).
Diagram for .NET provides two mechanisms for retrieving objects. One method is navigational, using the Children property on the NDocumentViewer object. The Children object's multiple Get methods allow you to retrieve objects by position, name, id and type (and more). The second method is criteria-based, using the NDocumentViewer's AccumulateChildren method. You pass a filter to the AccumulateChildren method specifying the kind of object that you want to retrieve and it adds the matching objects to a list of nodes. These two mechanisms are also repeated on most of the objects in the Nevron object model, so that you can search within specific nodes in a diagram.
While I've looked at the code-driven approach to using Diagram for .NET, it's not the only option. Diagram for .NET also supports importing data to create treeviews and graphs. I'm sure the functionality is wonderful but I have other tools for creating data driven treeviews, so I wasn't keenly interested in exploring that option. I also haven't begun to investigate giving the users custom objects to create their own diagrams on the fly. Or the many style objects for controlling the appearance of your diagrams.
Honestly, I think that I could have a lot of fun building applications with Diagram for .NET
.
Posted by Peter Vogel on 05/18/20100 comments
Now that I've created a diagram using Nevron's Diagram Designer and displayed it in a form so that a user can interact with it, I want to tie code to the diagram so that I can respond to the user's actions. The event that looks easiest to use is the Click event. Once in that event, I can use the view's Selection.Nodes collection to retrieve the currently selected Node.
Unfortunately, a Node has only two properties, which doesn't seem like much. However, Nevron's documentation made it clear that diagrams are made up of shapes: I'm willing to bet that I can convert this Node and get lots more properties. And I'm right: this code lets me retrieve values on a diagram object that I set back when I added the object to the diagram:
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 05/17/20100 comments
I was being dumb about drawing a diagram for Nevron's Diagram for .NET. I went back to my Start menu and looked under Nevron .NET Vision 2010.1 for VS2008 | Nevron Diagram | WinForm. There I found (eureka!) Nevron's Diagram Designer. I opened it and found what looks like a very complete object drawing tool. I used it to create a simple diagram (see Figure 1)
[Click on image for larger view.] |
| Figure 1. Nevron's Diagram for .NET package includes the Diagram Designer, which allows you to create a diagram without code. |
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 05/16/20100 comments
I've finally started actually creating a diagram with Diagram for .NET, following their "My First WinForm Diagram" tutorial. I'm putting my technical writing cap again: writing tutorials is hard. People (e.g. you and me) don't follow tutorials as they are written. Instead, we find a tutorial that does mostly what we want and then tweak it to do what we want (I've got
a blog article on that, too
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Posted on 04/30/20100 comments
At the end of my last session with Nevron's Diagram for .NET, I had realized that the tool was sufficiently unique that I was going to have to break down and read at least some of the documentation before I could do anything with it. <sigh>. In fact, <big sigh>.
I'll put on my technical writer hat: The documentation URL that Nevron gave me took me straight to the overall help page for Nevron's .NET Vision Package. The Treeview on the left pointed me to Diagram for .NET. The first item under Diagram for .NET was a single paragraph describing the product. I appreciated that: you'd be amazed how many blurbs I receive about products where I can't figure out what the heck the product does -- see my technical writing blog to watch me whine about that The second item in the treeview brought me to a more technical description of the product.
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 04/30/20100 comments
I'm not primarily a Windows Form developer so, when I review one of the standard toolpacks, I always worry whether I'm doing them justice: Is Infragistics' package significantly better than Telerik's package? I mean, these packages are huge and have been around for years. I've used the Infragistics package pretty extensively so I have a pretty good idea where the bodies are buried for that package -- can I speak with authority about ComponentOne's package?
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 04/29/20102 comments
We're going to be looking at some a product category in the near future that we haven't tackled before: databases for local storage -- databases embedded in an application.
I want to look at least two products in this area but I'm open to your suggestions as to what those products should be (currently I'm leaning towards Sybase and VistaDB but I could be persuaded to look at different products). I'm not interested in support for real "embedded" applications in hardware or mobile devices, nor am I interested in those super-fast databases that get their speed from holding everything in memory. The scenario that I want to go after is business applications that need local storage to handle off-line activities, or to provide users with their own dedicated storage, or to improve performance by eliminating network trips, and that need to persist their data even if the computer is shut down.
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 04/22/20107 comments
Back when I had a real job, I ran a software department for a large, multinational heavy equipment department (no, really, I did). As a developer, I put off writing documentation until the project was sufficiently late that my manager would cut the documentation task in order to get the project done on time. As a manager, I kept trying to get my team to start in on their documentation early.
It's not that developers are stupid or lazy (though those are the usual reasons given). Developers know that 80 percent of the documentation that is generated is [never used for anything. Most documentation is a waste of developer's time, and usually at the very time when there is absolutely no time to waste.
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 04/21/20100 comments
As part of reviewing dynaTrace's Enterprise and AJAX packages, I spoke with Eric Senunas, senior director of Marketing and Communications at dynaTrace, about the company's view of the .NET toolspace and the secrets to succeeding in that space.
dynaTrace is an interesting company to comment on the .NET toolspace because they've always supported both the Java and .NET environments. Eric said that they're seeing more non-.NET developers moving to .NET and a real, growing ecosystem around the Microsoft framework. As dynaTrace sees growth in the .NET area (Eric noted that 80 percent of their opportunities in Scandinavia are .NET-related), the company moves .NET features and enhancements "up in the roadmap." Eric's willing to ascribe that growth as much to Visual Basic 6 developers moving "into the enterprise" as developers moving from other environments.
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Posted by Peter Vogel on 04/21/20100 comments