By Praveen Ramesh

Syncfusion added support for ActivePivot visualization with our latest release. This white paper discusses this integration and how it can benefit you.

QuartetFS' ActivePivot is one of the leading OLAP server products offering a greatly optimized in-memory computation engine with a high-performance view of transactional data. ActivePivot's visualization is usually done from within ActivePivot’s Web site; however, many Syncfusion customers would like to integrate ActivePivot visualization into their own Web (ASP.NET, ASP.NET.MVC, Silverlight) and Windows (Windows Forms, WPF) applications.

This white paper includes:

· How Syncfusion added support for ActivePivot in our BI controls: Essential Grid, Chart, and Client.

· How this support provides great flexibility in incorporating ActivePivot data in custom applications.

· Links to two online demos for Silverlight and ASP.NET.

Down the free white paper and see the online demos.

As a provider of .NET components, Syncfusion is in the exciting, but challenging, position of always being on the cutting edge. Whenever platforms or tools ship out of Microsoft, which seems to be about every other week these days, we have to educate ourselves quickly.

A lot of information on application development is available, but that information is becoming harder to digest. More and more books are being published, even on topics that are relatively new; one aspect that continues to frustrate us is the inability to find technology books that offer a concise overview. When trying to gather information, we are usually faced with two options: read several 500+ page books, or scour the Web for relevant blog posts and articles. As with everyone who has a job to do and customers to serve, we find this quite aggravating.

This frustration translated into a deep desire to produce a series of concise technical books that would target developers working on the Microsoft platform. We firmly believe that, given the background knowledge such developers have, most topics can be translated into books that are around 100 pages. This is exactly what we resolved to accomplish with the Succinctly series.

The best authors, the best content

Each author was carefully chosen from a pool of talented experts who shared our vision. You will find books that contain original content guaranteed to get you up and running in about the time it takes to drink a few cups of coffee.

Forever free

Syncfusion will produce books on several topics. They will always be free. Any updates we publish will also be free. We can hear you say, "What is the catch?" There is no catch here. Syncfusion has a vested interest in this effort. As a component vendor, our claim is that we offer deeper and broader frameworks than anyone else in the market. Developer education greatly helps us sell against competing vendors who promise to enable AJAX support with one click or turn the moon to blue cheese!

The first book in this series, jQuery Succinctly, will be on the popular jQuery library. It is currently available for download.

As always, please let us know what you think. If you have any topics of interest, thoughts, or feedback, please feel free to send them to us at succinctly@syncfusion.com. We sincerely hope you enjoy the series. Thank you for reading.

We’ve just released our latest version of Essential Studio 2012. With this, our Volume 2 release, we’ve added over 90 new features and hundreds of lines of code. Every quarter we produce a comprehensive volume of tested and dependable components—more than anyone else, faster than anyone else.

With this release, we held true to our strong commitment to ASP.NET MVC as the platform of choice for Web and mobile development. Adding sub-gauges, auto-suggest functionality , and customizable waiting indicators(to name just a few features), we’ve increased our MVC controls for Web and mobile development, making our ASP.NET MVC offering the largest on the market.

Here are other highlights from Essential Studio 2012 Volume 2:

Project Wizard for ASP.NET MVC

You’re probably familiar with the project templates in Visual Studio; now you can create projects based on those templates that have been modified for Syncfusion controls. Our Project Wizard for ASP.NET MVC automatically inserts all references necessary for the Syncfusion controls and the theme you’ve chosen.

New Pivot Grid for Windows Forms

We already have popular pivot grids for other platforms; this latest iteration extends that same functionality to Windows Forms, allowing you to visualize summary data in a cross-tabulated form. No shortcuts have been taken. You can expect full support for sorting, grouping, filtering, as well as the ability to drag dimensions into columns and rows.

Support for Quartet FS ActivePivot Engine

We’ve had many requests to add support for this impressive in-memory analytics engine to our business intelligence offering. Now we’ve delivered. With complete support for the Quartet FS ActivePivot Engine, you can now visualize ActivePivot data natively within you .NET Web and Windows applications and build very impressive BI information portals.

Aside from the major aspects of this release, Syncfusion continues to fortify many of its strong, existing products. For example, our reporting studio now supports tagged PDFs in HTML-to-PDF conversion; our PDF Viewer now supports embedded fonts and more image formats; and our reporting suite has added a custom pivot engine for run-time manipulation of pivot tables.

We’re of a hard and fast mentality to advance new development paradigms, as we’re doing with ASP.NET MVC and Mobile MVC, while at the same time continually adding to long-standing technologies such as Silverlight and Windows Forms.

There’s more to come. This is only the second release of four that are due out this year. In a few weeks, we’ll release our road map for Volume 3, coming this summer. And let’s not forget about ONEBASE, our bridging technology that will allow you to build mobile applications in ASP.NET MVC and output natively to iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.

At Syncfusion, we always disclose our development plans with very little wait, and we always put new products on the market faster than anyone can match.

I love using LINQPad to create and test quick snippets. LINQPad brings some of the instant gratification associated with dynamic languages, such as Python and Ruby, to C#. Until recently, I had not used LINQPad to work with UI code.

A few days ago, I was looking to test a small WPF code snippet. I figured there must be a way to use LINQPad. Several searches later, I had a working snippet that I have been using since. The code is quite simple, and it turned out that LINQPad has great built-in support for WPF through the PanelManager.StackWpfElement and PanelManager.DisplayWpfElement API calls. These calls allow you to create UI elements inside a named panel displayed in the lower pane beside the results window. Additional details are available at http://www.linqpad.net/CustomVisualizers.aspx.

Displaying a list box

   1: var items = new ObservableCollection<Product>();

   2:         

   3:         // collection initialization

   4:     

   5:         var list = new ListBox();

   6:         

   7:         string template =     @"<StackPanel>

   8:                                     <TextBlock Text='{Binding Description}' Background='Orange'/>

   9:                                     <TextBlock Text='{Binding Name}'/>

  10:                                 </StackPanel>

  11:                             ";

  12:         

  13:         list.ItemTemplate = template.ToDataTemplate();

  14:         list.ItemsSource = items;

  15:         PanelManager.StackWpfElement(list, "WPF");

  16:         

Note

DataTemplate is instantiated using an extension method. The method takes a snippet of XAML, plugs it into a standard XAML snippet for data templates (containing standard namespaces), and then instantiates the XAML using XamlReader.Load. You can, of course, change the XAML format to include other custom assemblies.

Code that instantiates Data Template

   1: public static object InstantiateXAML(string xaml)

   2:     {

   3:         return XamlReader.Load

   4:         (

   5:             XmlReader.Create(new StringReader(xaml))

   6:         );    

   7:     }

   8:  

   9:     public static DataTemplate ToDataTemplate(this string template)

  10:     {

  11:         string templateFormat = @"<DataTemplate  

  12:                                 xmlns='http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation' 

  13:                                 xmlns:x='http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml'>

  14:                                 {0}

  15:                             </DataTemplate>";

  16:         

  17:         return (DataTemplate) InstantiateXAML(string.Format(templateFormat, template));

  18:     }

The snippet provided in the download link below also demonstrates setting content, attaching event handlers, and obtaining access to dynamically created elements.

Note

You will have to add the following assembly references and namespace imports in LINQPad. The F4 key will cause the dialog that allows these to be added and displayed. Once added, you can save the assemblies as default.

Assemblies

1. PresentationCore.dll

2. PresentationFramework.dll

3. System.Windows.Controls.Ribbon.dll

4. System.Windows.dll

5. System.Windows.Interactivity.dll

6. System.Windows.Presentation.dll

7. System.Xaml.dll

8. WindowsBase.dll

Namespaces

1. System.Net

2. System.Net.Mail

3. System

4. System.Collections.Generic

5. System.Linq

6. System.Text

7. System.Collections

8. System.Windows

9. System.Windows.Controls

10. System.Collections.ObjectModel

11. System.Windows.Markup

Give it a try. This is the download link: http://www.syncfusion.com/downloads/Support/DirectTrac/92196/wpf1270257153.zip

By Daniel Jebaraj

Now that mobile devices have taken us by storm, most enterprise developers will, sooner or later, have to develop a mobile application of some kind. Serious consideration must be given to find the best environment for mobile development. This is challenging given that the mobile marketplace is so fragmented.

Currently, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone are the dominant operating systems in the market. Most developers want to deploy their apps on all these devices; nothing is gained by choosing only one. However, this fragmentation presents many obstacles to development: (1) Several possible platforms that can be used for development; (2) at least three IDEs for three operating systems; (3) multiple versions of Android; (4) varying access to native hardware, depending on which development environment you choose.

Doesn’t it make you long for the days when enterprise development just meant targeting Windows? This is new ground for developers, especially those of us working on the .NET platform.

Right now, as a developer, you basically have three options in front of you: Mobile Web sites, native applications, or “hybrid” applications. The pros and cons of each have to be weighed. Making the wrong choice today could mean a lot of backpedaling tomorrow.

Mobile websites powered by HTML 5 are probably the most popular option for mobile development right now. HTML 5 itself has gotten a great deal of press due to the fact that the current versions of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS have created richer Web-based applications than was achievable in the past without a plugin. Choosing this route makes sense because the Web browsers on all mobile devices are good, and relatively standards-adherent, you can be very confident that your Web-based app will render the same across multiple devices.

With mobile websites, you also work in a single, simplified structure often backed by great server-side tooling such as the ASP.NET MVC platform. What you miss, however, is extended access to native hardware. To get that, you have to choose native development.

Native development is the best way to create an app that can access and utilize native hardware. It also offers a seamless user experience. What you lose by choosing the native route is time. Deploying to each device requires your team be skilled in Objective C, Java, and C# or VB.NET. Each device requires a separate code base. That’s a great deal of development time and training spent to ensure your app reaches all devices.

Outside of mobile Web development and native development, an alternate option that has recently gained a lot of ground is the so-called “hybrid” option. Hybrid applications host a native Web browser control inside a native shell. They then display either local or remotely served Web pages.

For most developers, this solution provides the best of all worlds. It’s a good balance between the standardization of HTML 5 on the client side, the access to hardware of a native app, and the control, power, and code reuse provided by a server platform. I recently conducted a webinar on how to develop a hybrid app from scratch using an ASP.NET MVC template. Please check it out. And keep an eye on our website for updates on the bridging wrapper we’re developing for our ASP.NET MVC controls.