Plotting library for Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight - silverlight

Is there any plotting control/library for Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight? I want to plot a signal, ideally with the ability to pinch zoom it and pan it (but thats too much to expect probably :)?

Here's a free one, and if you're only plotting one set of data, it's great. Pinch-Zoom on the horizontal axis.
http://touchgraphwp7.codeplex.com/

I have played around with the tools here: http://www.visifire.com/
They have a 30 day trial, but you have to buy the full version if you want to actually use it for your apps. It is pretty nice, and it supports zooming and scrolling. I didn't end up using it very much in the app I was making though, so I don't really know how comprehensive or useful it will end up being.
Hope that helps!

You should check out Quick Charts by amCharts. It's a set of free controls that might be able to do the job. Check out their website here

Related

Port an OpenLayers application to mobile devices

After making a duration/cost estimation, I'm about to start developing a desktop application using OpenLayers. I've never had experience on it before, but have the support of some coworkers who do.
Now we have to estimate the time and effort it would take the same application to be viewable in mobile devices. I know the existence of openlayers.mobile.js, but nobody in my company has ever worked with it before.
I know it has some advantages over the normal OpenLayers library, such as pinching for zooming, and so. But, does it has any blocked capabilities? I mean, if I write code to draw a line on a layer in the desktop application, change the simbology of a layer, add a buffer arround a polyline, etc.. will it still work with the mobile library?
Is there funcionality in the desktop version that is not in the mobile one?
I'd need to know before estimating what can I offer in the mobile version, and how hard will it be to get so.
See examples tagged with mobile:
http://dev.openlayers.org/examples/
The next OpenLayer versions will probably have better mobile support as this is something many users are interested in.

How can I create an animated tile on WP7?

How can I create an animated tile on WP7 similar to the XBox Live Tile? What are the options for Animating tiles in general?
After a good bit of research I leaning towards it is not possible. You can use push notification to update the tile which does add some flexibility and opportunity but achieving the same effect as the XBox live tile is looking unlikely. With that said I do understand the motivation for the limitation if animations were available this feature would be abused and would ultimately lead to slow devices.
In a recent Channel 9 video (about 11 minutes in) the softie presenters say this requires Microsoft "special sauce", e.g. this feature is not available to non Microsoft developers. I am guessing (only a guess!) that they will eventually open this feature. The link is here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/This+Week+On+Channel+9/TWC9-mvcConf-WP7-Tools-update-AsmSpy-JavaScript-OO

which tools to use for designing cooliris type applications?

I want to utilise the 3dwall feature of cooliris, the physics effects of the icons in bumtop to design an application for making the image viewing more intuitive and interactive. I dont want to use flash as it would slow down the speed for interaction on desktop. PLease could someone tell me about
choice of
1.) physics engine - physx or ODE for the physics effects like bumtop
2.) opengl or direct 3d
3.) WPF(windows presentation Format) - what is its use
Flash with Actionscript 3 is the best for such things. Checkout http://www.flashloaded.com/flashcomponents/3dwall/ for an illustration of CoolIris type application in Flash.
WPF is great for building application like this. VS2008 doesn't provide solution for good visualization,
but you can always call for help Blend included in MS Expression. There you can select silverlight project for building fancy web applications (silverlight.net/showcase). At start, combining different controls and trigger events to start simulations is entirely included. Yes, inside Blend you can set frame keys like in flash.
It's certainly a lots of effort, but it don't need to be. Recently new set of WIN RadControls for WinForms and Silverlight are issued and they look, believe me, excellent. You can look for Run Demo program which shows example of using these controls. Under section Integration, Carousel and others you will see what you looking for and beyound.

How do I play movies in a C# WinForm application

I am trying to play a movie (wmv,avi,mpg,etc.) in a winforms application. I would like the user to be able to start, stop and pause.
I'm not looking for a full answer ... I just need pointed in the right direction. I've already did some searching on google but could not find anything useful. I can continue searching but I know the stackoverflow community rocks.
So, please point me in the right direction!
Thanks.
I think this is probably the path of least resistance:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb383953.aspx
You could use Windows Media Player ActiveX control.
You could also embed a WPF control that contains a MediaElement control.
Another alternative is to use the VLC library instead of Windows Media Player. The VLC Forums have a number of wrappers that can be used in C#.
I have not done a comparison of VLC versus Windows Media Player, but it is alot less resource intensive then the WPF media elements.
If I remember correctly VLC also has built in support for alot of video formats, potentially making it a better choice I guess.
One possibility is to use the Forms.WebBrowser class. This will give you an embedded web browser so you can install what ever player and plugins you need.
It depends on how complicated you want to get, but I've had luck implementing DirectShow before. It's definitely more complicated than a drop on control, but it's really flexible for different formats and loading codecs.

WPF 3-D performance for head-tracking app

I’m working on creating a full-screen 3-D app (based on Johnny Lee's Wii head tracking app) with some augmented reality features, and it seems that WPF is too slow to render even the simple models I’m using at a reasonable frame rate. I think the problem is that I need to change both the view and projection of the camera on just about every frame, because of the nature of the app (it uses a web cam to track your face, and uses that data to move the camera around and change its perspective).
I've spent a lot of time trying to narrow down the problem, and it's definitely related to the graphics, and not the speed of the head-tracking API that I'm using. Also, I recreated the app in XNA, and it seems to work fine there (28 FPS versus 9 in WPF). Finally, when I remove the "walls" or make the window much smaller (say, 800 x 600), WPF's performance greatly improves, which makes me think that the bottleneck is the graphics calculations.
As a result, I need to either find a new graphics back-end to work with, or find a way to make WPF much faster for this app. I’m mostly looking at DirectX and XNA, and possibly OpenGL. Any recommendations on which of these APIs would be best to use for this app in .NET? Or alternatively, any idea what I'm doing wrong in WPF that's slowing things down?
I've not done enough with 3D in WPF to be able to say what could be causing the slowness, but I did notice that it's model datastructure isn't very efficient. While this might not be the cause it could be symptomatic of general slowness to the whole pipeline.
One thing that does spring to mind is that WPF is rendering the scene in software rather than using the hardware acceleration on the graphics card. The fact that you get better performance (though you don't say how much better) with a smaller window.
If you remove any textures from your model do you get better performance too?
I don't think it really matters whether you go for Direct3D or OpenGL - virtually all modern cards support them equally well. XNA is the obvious choice if you're sticking with .NET as it's integrated into Visual Studio - even the Express edition.
I would check out SlimDX, a much thinner DirectX wrapper than XNA or WPF
The problem with changing the projection on every frame is that API's like XNA/WPF werent designed with this in mind, so were optimized to have projection set once in the initialization phase, then not again.
I would suggest a hybrid choice here: use WPF for what its good at (Windows UI, composition, etc) and use XNA to render the 3D. There are samples out there that demonstrates combining XNA with WinForms. It should be possible to do the same "trick" to render XNA onto surfaces in WPF.
Update: there are supposedly issues with using XNA directly with WPF. This thread indicates that using XNA with WinForms and then hosting the WinForms control in WPF is a workaround to these issues. I've not tested this myself though (yet).

Resources