I've been using Google's Annotated Time Line Visualization component for the last couple of weeks and I love it! I've been able to make plots with about 10k points without much trouble.
Do you know of a desktop component I could plug into my application that delivers the same WOW factor that Google's component does? I don't care what the language/toolkit is. I prefer C#,Java,Ruby,C++ or Python... (in that order) however any other's would apply. I also prefer it to be free and open source, but if it's not that's OK as well.
Thanks for your time!
Note: This doesn't have to be cross-platform. Windows is fine.
Edit (2009-08-07):
Even if I can only plot 10k points, I am fine with that. I would just like a desktop control that delivers the same "wow" factor and works in a similar manner (zooming, scrolling, annotations, etc) that the Google component does.
Edit (2009-09-03):
I really prefer the language to be C#. I started a bounty to see if anyone can find some good ones. I want it to be almost identical to Google's Annotated Timeline Component. I would use Google's Component, but I want a desktop component... and I don't want to run into performance limitations because of the browser. Using Adobe Air is out of the question.
Edit (2009-09-03):
Do not recommend Visifire. I have evaluated it, and it doesn't support zooming. Remember, it must be very close to Google's component in terms of functionality and "wow" factor.
This WPF-based chart control at codeproject may put you in the right direction. It's got smooth panning/zooming/scrolling :
WPF Chart Control With Pan, Zoom and More By John Stewien
If you're needing to plot millions of points, you're going to run into performance issues quickly if the control doesn't have a mechanism for loading/sampling only what it needs to display. Even then, that's a very large number of data point to want to access in one control.
Hm i am not sure if this is what you are looking for, but for java there is the very good library JFreeChart which is not exactly as interactive as the one you mentioned but it is really easy to use and pretty flexible for you to subclass and tweak to your preference.
Perhaps you could take a look at matplotlib. It's a python based library, however it's very flexible in that it can take it's input from a variety of sources.
An alternative is to embed a web browser control in you wpf application. You'll probably need access to the DOM, so you might have to use the WebBrowser in a WinForm. A good article descibing how this is done can be found here.
Microsoft also has free chart control you can get at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=130F7986-BF49-4FE5-9CA8-910AE6EA442C&displaylang=en. It's pretty good--especially for being free.
I have used Dundas charts in the past. They are excellent but pricey. There are several other vendors with good chart controls including DotNetCharting, Telerik, Component Art, and Infragistics.
Related
Could someone please advise me on the "correct" way of implementing Pull to refresh on UWP?
Below are some examples I've found however I'm not sure which one is using the best approach:
Microsoft sample which is for a ListView - This works however it is specific to the ListView Control
AmazingPullToRefresh is a NuGet package that also works however it is somewhat limited in terms of styling
PullToRefreshUWP_WindowsComposition is another example however it works differently to the other two as it does not use an extension class
Any advice is much appreciated
There is no standard answer for this question, basically, there are two points we need to implement:
Get the offset changes when user pull something on the control
Generate some indicator to notify user
Both XamlPullToRefresh and PullToRefreshUWP_WindowsComposition use the new Windows Composition API: Windows.UI.Composition namespace
Ref Windows.UI.Composition Overview
The API is a powerful supplement to existing frameworks such as XAML
to give developers of UWP applications a familiar C# surface to add to
their application. These APIs can also be used to create DX style
framework-less applications.
Please notice that this API works only on Windows 10.
While AmazingPullToRefresh uses Manipulation API and implement all things by calculating offset changes. A similar implementation can be found here
If you want to implement a cool pull-to-refresh control, I would recommend using the Windows.UI.Composition API. You can get start from here
The functionality of pulling to refresh is not used by microsoft.
Reloading a page / data is something we have still in our mind from thinking apps like a website.
Why not have a synced database and alway update your UI with the data which got changed in your local db? For eg. see firebase.google.com
If you want to implement this feature anyway there is not really a way to go.
I have used the PullToRefresh.UWP library from NuGet. For a tutorial see:
codeproject.com
With some tweaking it works but sometimes when I lift my finger of the screen after pulling down the bar won't go up again.
So the answer is: Sorry, but nobody can give you an answer on how to do this the "correct" way. But is there a correct way anywhere? Like almost always in programming. It depends on the case you will use it.
Hope this will help you.
I have a requirement to create Chart like this :
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ecgtoolkit-cs/
I have to be very specific on how much data it needs to display per unit in graph. I can do it using manual Drawing, but is there any easy way to build this without doing it manually?
I am thinking about the alternatives.
Thanks in advance.
ZedGraph will do the job. It's easy to setup and make exactly what you want and you can control the data through the IPointList classes.
The only negative is the current lack of support, however there's a lot of info in the Wayback Machine, as well as support board at SourceForge
Telerik is a reliable and high quality control maker. Alot of people will attest to the quality and ease of development with Telerik Rad Controls.
What is the best method of printing math equations in a C# (winforms) desktop application? The format for the source is not important; I can generate almost anything with a little effort. What is important is that it should be relatively high performance and low overhead (I know, I'm only supposed to pick 2 of { performance, size, features } but I want all 3.)
Things I have considered:
LaTeX via System.Process() -> dvipng. Problem: even a minimal LaTeX instal is about 200 MB. Considering that my app is currently ~400k I think this is a bit excessive.
Some sort of JS-based math rendering library designed for the web, e.g. JSMath. Problem: creates HTML output, which still needs to be displayed in a WebBrowser. Low (probably very low) performance.
Rolling my own. Problems: Takes a lot of time and effort to duplicate the works of those who have gone before. Difficult to draw text in C#.
Any suggestions? Have any of you done this sort of thing in the past?
Some googling lead me to this CodeProject article: it uses MimeTex, a library that generates gif from latex formulas. You'll have to use PInvoke to have it in C#, but everything seems to be in the article.
You can use MEEL for WinForms. It realy easy to use.
A potential solution for your application, if it is feasible, would be to host an online active server page that you could pass LaTeX markup and have it return an image. Obvious constraints include bandwidth, network access, and speed.
Using the CodeProject and MineTex links provided by CharlesB would be great starting points, from which a C#/ASP solution could be implemented.
Then, from winforms, you could make the request and obtain an image which could be displayed within a control, or even rendered using GDI+.
I'm using WINFORMS not WPF.
I just know basic c# .net gui programming. I donot want the traditional windows look. I want to have my own custom look (eg. gtalk, antivirus softwares, media players, google chrome).
Actually I'm inspired by google's PICASA software. Its awesome. I want to do something like that.How can I do that? If there is something I should learn please point me.
Also I may have to write my own custom controls (like modified tree view etc..) I guess. Please give some good learning resources.
This article describes how to draw custom windows. The author also shows how to draw non-rectangular windows.
If you could use WPF instead of Windows Forms, this is a good article about customizing window drawing:
http://www.codeguru.com/csharp/.net/net_wpf/article.php/c16379/
There is also a question with some good answers here on SO:
Creating custom forms in WPF?
Update:
I think that skinning and custom drawing is fun to do from a programmers perspective, but I also think that there is almost no benefit for the user.
The creators of the platform you are developing for might have put a lot of effort into the design of their windowing toolkits.
If you just want to change some visual aspects of your application you also should take into account that you might miss some important other aspects of UI design:
consistency
accessibility
aesthetics (if you are overdoing
effects, gradients, ...)
internationalization
...
As you are developing for Windows, you also lose the skinning ability of the OS itself. And I think that some of the skins that come with newer versions of Windows are pretty good.
You can try any of the following:
telerik
Syncfusion
(source: componentsource.co.jp)
Or other components.
They do make your UI pretty.
Edit: if you want to study how they do it, you can buy the source code-- along with documentation and understand from there.
There are some commercial control libraries available.
I can recommend the Krypton Suite. It consists of the free Krypton Toolkit (which contains a lot of skinnable controls) and other non-free controls (Navigator, Ribbon, Docking, Workspace). It has some built-in palettes and renderers that allow you to make your UI look like Office 2010, Office 2007, Office 2003, ...
You want to look for +winforms +skinning. I haven't tried these, but the first hits don't look bad. Most decent skinning tools will be paid for.
From what you said, you want to develop your own custom controls. You have some frameworks for this like Qt which can use Direct3D for hardware accelerated graphics. It also have a Visual Studio plugin. There is a free LGPL version and a commercial version of it.
I remembered about Qt because you mentioned Picasa and as far as I remember, I heard the Picasa UI has been written through Qt.
You can try using "SetWindowRgn(..)" to set an arbitrary region for your window. This may range from giving a rounded rectangle shape to giving a weird looking shape to the form!
Check this out: Link.
There is another option if you are working in Vista(aero enabled), ie you can check out DwmExtendFrameIntoClientArea(..) function here: link text
You can set the form's border style to 'none' and go on to create your custom form! You then might have to create custom buttons to carry out tasks like close, minimise, maximise etc. You might even need to write code for drag and drop events..
For the background, you might need to have a look at the gradient fills to give a great effect, otherwise you can use great looking pictures as Background..! But the latter option isnt good unless you have really good pic.
How can I implement ActiveX Document on C#/.NET? (ActiveX Document can draw itself in IE)
Update: I need a solution for drawing my own document type in IE windows (like MS Word or MS Excel draw its documents in IE).
You need to dive into OLE for that purpose.
Things like IOleDocument, IOleInPlaceSite (see MSDN for that). Figure out which interfaces are needed for the client (as IE would be the container and will need to communicate with your interface implementations), and how the communication is going on, e.g. what gets called when.It's not rocket science, but I believe still a fair amount of work.
Look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.htmldocument.domdocument.aspx, it's .NET wrapper for DOM Document
My first thought is that you could use a WPF Page, which can be hosted in a WPF window or in IE.
From MSDN:
Encapsulates a page of content that can be
navigated to and hosted by Windows
Internet Explorer, NavigationWindow,
and Frame.
This is possible but it is tough.. What is bad is the lack of documentation... Microsoft has no interest in supporting this scenario. Another difficult part is debugging the boundaries between the HTML/DOM and the ActiveX control.
For what you're doing, it sounds like Silverlight would be a better choice. It only supports a subset of .Net, but it supports drawing graphics. It'll be a lot easier for you to find documentation. And it will run on non-Windows computers.
But maybe you need something Silverlight doesn't do (like audio input support). If thats the case, there's various blogs on the subject of varying quality. Here are the two that stood out as most helpful to me:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/CreateActiveXDotNet.aspx
http://blog.ianchivers.com/wordpress/?p=22
I do recommend using OleView to inspect the type libraries you produce, and make sure its what you expect. You can also do this to see how to break event properties into get/set functions, which is something I had to do to debug some scenarios.
Also be cognizant of the difference of "attaching debugger to process" with scripted or managed debugging. At some point you'll attach with one when you think you've used the other.