Dundas Gauge for .NET

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.

Price: $699 Meant For: .NET developers Key Specs: A variety of graphics options like bar/pie graphs, dials and meters for your applications Pros: Visually appealing, easy to script Cons: None Contact: Dundas Software, USA gary.takasaki@dundas.com  www.dundas.com RQS# E41 or SMS Buy 131141 to 6677

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