Anyone know which control they used on this site to get the Organisation chart? http://www.yworks.com/products/yfilessilverlight/SilverChart.html
Or any other controls that are similiar?
If not, could you suggest a way on how to get started building one? (Interface-wise, I think I know how to get the data binding to work).
The organisation chart control is their own, thats whole point of the demo page.
The UI elements involved are quite simple rectangular items. The real trick is calculating their placement on panel and routing the connecting lines.
I guess the missing peice of the puzzle is what generically we would call that. If you know that then you have a basis for a web search for algorithms for doing this sort of thing either academically or in some other product entirely, then bring that knowledge to your own Silverlight code.
Alternatively you could just go out buy the product.
Related
We need to get rid of DevExpress Bootstrap Controls for ASP.NET Core from project.
What would be the easiest/cheapest/feastet solution?
To simply rewrite everything with a different framework like Angular/Vue/React?
Maybe there is a known framework/method of migrating to DevExpress ASP.NET Core Controls? Or to something else?
How many controls were used from DevExpress?
If you only used a few controls, then you only need a few replacements.
I would not call purchase of some controls from DevExpress a whole "framework", but that of only purchasing some controls to use with your project.
So, does the project use 3-5 or 50 of those DevExpress controls? (by using, I mean DIFFERENT kinds of controls).
If you only used a few, say like their GridView, then you would only need to find a replacement for their gridview control, or simply use the built-in one, and fancy it up with some css, and addtional options. (I would make a user control).
So, you want to determine what the controls used did, how many different controls were used, and then find some controls that have a great look and feel that you like.
Their grid controls are VERY nice, since they have some "really" nice filter options for the header of that grid control.
So, you need to find some control replacements, but how many did the project use will quite much determine scope here.
So, in place of say their tab control, then consider using the jQuery one. As noted, I would wrap say the jQuery.UI tab control into a user control, so then you can just drag + drop in that jQuery.UI "tab" control in place of the devExpress one.
Same goes for the multi-select combo box (dropdown list).
So, either you cobbile together some replacements of your own, or you find some replacemetns, or you buy some more controls from another vendor.
The challenge and issue will of course be that each of their controls has a specific object and event model.
However, that's not really any different then say if you started used sweet-alert, and now want to replace sweet-alert say with some jQuery.UI dialogs.
I would say that the real challenge of replacing their controls is often not so much finding a replacement, but finding something that has a great look and feel. The main huge wonderful bonus of the devExpress controls tends to be their look and feel. In other words, they had someone with REALLY good taste in terms of look and feel.
I mean, for years I used the ajaxtoolkit. (free, open source). it was and still remains a fantastic set of controls. The pop dialog, the tab control, the multi-select combo box, the HTML editor?
They are all great, but their HUGE downside is not the features, but the controls from that free toolkit look like something from the 1980's!!!
The popular jQuery.UI? Same thing, the controls look ugly and something designed by a un-employed rodeo clown living in a trailer park.
There is a HUGE but BEYOND huge reason that bootstap is so popular.
Know the answer?
Why of course bootstrap is popular for ONE big HUGE massive SIMPLE reason:
Bootstrap has a fantastic look + feel. (zero other reasons for bootstrap being popular!!).
If you ever hired a graphic artist to re-work the look and feel of your web site? Guess what? Their resulting work and suggestions will look like the default of bootstrap!!!
So, someone in the print and graphic design industry or someone with VERY good talent and great taste created the bootstrap system. So, when you use bootstrap, then you get fantastic looking results, results that normally would take a full time graphic artist on your staff.
Regardless, we are wondering off topic here.
The main issue you have to determine is how many controls were used from devExpress. Most of their controls do follow a similar object model as the base controls found in asp.net webform controls.
So, for example, jQuery.UI controls has a great set of features (a great set of UI components), but they look way too dated and old fashioned.
The issue you have is not that you want to replace some of the devExpress controls you used, but how much work it would be to replace say a dev-express "gridview" with another different grid control. Every single one of those controls used will not only require you to spend HUGE amounts of time finding a replacement, but I think the LARGER issue is finding something that don't look like it was created by someone living in mom's basement, or by that drunken un-employed rodeo clown that does not belong in our industry.
your issue is not finding some replacement controls, your issue is how much code and money (time and resources) you have available to replace those controls.
You can no more change a bunch of code in c# to then using say client side JavaScript can then you take some Pascal code, and covert that code to vb.net code.
There no more a replacement for those controls from dev-express then there is deciding tomorrow to re-write some server side code in vb.net to now being client side JavaScript code.
In fact, what I am quite much telling you?
How the computer and IT industry has worked for 50+ years has NOT change one bit, and it not change one bit if you decide to rip out some existing controls and replace them with different controls.
Its possible you are asking for something you never seen, never heard of, and thus are imagining some magic wand here, but those don't exist in our industry either, do they?
As I noted, for quite some time, I used the AjaxToolKit. Turns out that jQuery.UI has near EVERY the same kind of controls available. But, the massive difference is jQuery.UI controls are client side ones, but worse yet, they don't work the same as the AjaxToolKit ones. In other words, there is a nice "tab" control in AjaxToolkit, and there is a nice tab control in jQuery.UI. So, they both are tab control, but THEY are VAST different in their operations, how you use them, how they work.
However, both the jQuery.UI and the AjaxToolkit tab control?
My gosh, do they look like crap.
At least the jQuery.UI one can be easy bootstrapped styled.
Again, note how we not really now back to a JUST having a control replacement, but one that looks VERY nice and VERY tasteful out of the box, and a control that should take zero efforts on your part to obtain that great look and feel.
Want to know what product has those great looking controls and great look and feel out of the box?
the DevExpress ones!!!
I'm trying to create a view in Silverlight that can display rounds in a tournament. At the moment I have a set of grid views side by side and each one shows all the people still in that round of the knockout.
What I am trying to achieve is a view that shows clearly who played who and when their next games. Something similar to the below. I'm just wanting some pointers in the direction of what control I could manipulate enough to achieve this as I am very much new to Silverlight.
If you're looking for components you can tweak to work this way, I would strongly recommend investigating some of the third-party components designed for creating diagrams and/or org charts. Some cost money, but in my experience, the cost of a third-party control is less than the cost of my time to reproduce it myself. Here are some links to investigate:
Free: (Most of these are vertical, but you could tweak them to meet your horizontal layout):
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/Org_Chart_Generator.aspx
http://omourad.blogspot.com/2009/08/silverlight-organization-chart.html
http://www.sharpdevel.com/2009/12/organization-chart-free-control-in.html
Money:
http://nwoods.com/components/silverlight-wpf/goxam-overview.htm (<-- my personal preference)
http://www.mindfusion.eu/diagramlite.html
http://www.syncfusion.com/products/user-interface-edition/silverlight/diagram
Good luck!
I am looking for a light-weight map component that displays a map of the US and allows users to click on a State and see information pertaining to that state. The data I want to display is in my database. I just need to know what state was selected so I can display the detail. This is something I am doing to get familiar with Silverlight.
All the searches for Silverlight/ Maps I have done so far have pointed me at solutions that are far more complicated than I need. My perception is that using Bing Maps to do this simple task would a waste of the features provide by Bing.
Anyone know of such a Component? Am I wrong that Bing Maps is not the right tool for the job?
TIA!
If you have access to Expression Studio (specifically Expression Design), creating maps as vector based images is quite easy. Poly-paths in Xaml are also relatively efficient to store and serve up compared to images.
You import a map as a background image and use the pen tool to dot-to-dot trace around the country. Combine all those path segments into a single path. Then create a separate poly-path for each state (close them to allow for a fill).
It will take a few hours to build all this (I know having done this for a world map country selector... took 4-5 hours solid for the one polygon styled below):
By having each state represented by a filled polygon-path highlighting (by changing the fill colour) is trivial on mouse-enter/mouse-leave events.
If you want stylistic map, remove the image, otherwise use transparency on the state polygons to show the map through the roll-overs.
Update:
And if you get yourself a graphic tablet and pen this sort of point-to-point work is about 5 times faster than with a mouse!
The interaction with Bing Maps in Silverlight is really strong and provide you with easy communication between the map and your data. I would give Bing Maps a try.
I'm not sure if you've already come across this, but it seems you can also use the control with custom tile sources. Here are a few resources.
http://www.cadmaps.com/gisblog/?p=54
http://developers.de/blogs/damir_dobric/archive/2009/11/16/implementing-custom-map-in-silverlight-map-control.aspx
http://labs.mandogroup.com/skinning-the-silverlight-bing-maps-control/
Custom Rendering in Bing Silverlight Control
Approaching Silverlight development is a rather daunting task as it seems to require a rather different mindset to work I have done in the past.
I have been working on it for several months and we have already released an application that presents form-based pages. So I have the basics of XAML for layout but what I need to do now is move into graphically representing data. For example transform a list of objects representing vehicle speed recordings into a line graph of speed. I am at a loss on what the best way is to approach this.
Can anyone point me to articles or tutorials that present this kind of thing?
Your first port of call for Silverlight learning should be the official site http://silverlight.net/Learn/
If you want to do any data visualization/charting then first try the Silverlight Toolkit on codeplex. It's fantastic if you want to get anything up and running quickly.
Also check out Delay's Blog on charting and the chartbuilder code
Bang your head against it for 3-6 months. That's how I did it and it's worked out pretty well so far.
But seriously, the learning curve sucks.
There's charting libraries for Silverlight out there, you could grab one of those but I wouldn't waste money on it. It's relatively easy to write this kind of code yourself.
All you really need is a DrawingVisual. Once you have that you can render what you need on to it's surface. The trick is to make sure that you have sufficient layout information when you render. Because this is vector graphics, you can use the ScaleTransform to match your content bounds instead of repainting on size changed. Other than that, you'll wanna host your DrawingVisual in a UIFrameworkElement and let the dimension of that object govern where and how you draw your data. This will give you all the layout goodness of WPF/Silverlight.
For drawing there are plenty of Geometry classes you can rely on but there's one thing that you'll wanna do and that's to adjust the level of detail in your data points with respect to your drawing. This is the number one trick to make sure you don't hog the CPU.
Avoid drawing more than one data point per pixel. If you have a lot of data points, and a small drawing surface you can use a rolling average to smooth the result.
If you approach this with the above things in mind you should be able to write a flexible graph UI element that you can visualize data with, in no time at all.
I did this in a WPF application, I'm pretty much assuming that you can do the exact same thing with Silverlight 2.0, you'll just yell at me if you cant?
I'm in need of a WPF layer control that does the following
1) Have multiple layers of content on top of each other.
2) Ability to turn layers on/off at design and runtime, ie we need a UI maybe something like a tabbed control
3) Move layers up/down the stack
4) Change opacity for layers
Now I know all of the above is possible in Xaml/WPF. I've coded up a simple version using a grid, that has mutiple cells at design time, 1 cell = 1 layer, and only a single cell at runtime, all the cells are merged into one. Thing is that was a kludge, didn't give me the design time control that I needed, all controls end up with a single parent, ugly. Anyone got an off the shelf, or part working example - if not I'll code up a proper one and share it on CodePlex.
I'm sure I'm not the only person out there who needs this functionality, am I?
With my previous client we accomplished this using Canvases. The application was a 'CAD' like in nature so our layers were responsible for graphical representations of the domain.
I do not know of any 3rd party tools that accomplish this at the moment.
I think the reasoning for this is that when you are looking for this functionality it is very specific to the domain & application.
If you were going to build your own control I would encourage building a custom control for managing the logic, then allow others to style the look and feel. It would be more of the Wpf way of approaching the problem.
In that way if 1 consumer wants to use canvases they could. If you wanted to use a grid, then you could as well.
If you have any psuedo code of what you would like to do, I can see if any of my old POCs can be modified to meet your needs. Or if you want to start a CodePlex project I wouldn't mind contributing.
That's just my 2 cents.