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.

Ever need to convert multiple Word documents into one Pdf document?  Here is a quick and easy sample showing just that!

Sample Link

Multiple docs, doc to pdf

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 have had some questions about this topic and thought it a good time to post up a sample showing just how easy it is.  Please download the sample here: DataMatrix sample.

The WPF team made this sample and it shows how to create the DataMatrix barcode.

Syncfusion’s Windows Forms FAQ played a significant role in introducing Syncfusion to the .NET community. Both Syncfusion and .NET were new in 2001 and 2002 as Syncfusion was building its first products. Early on, it was decided that one way to publicize the Syncfusion brand was to produce a FAQ that would serve as a resource for the .NET community. FAQs for earlier technologies, such as MFC, had served to bring people to websites and generally reflected positively on the company that sponsored such efforts.

Syncfusion was working exclusively with Windows Forms at the time, so doing a Windows Forms FAQ was a no-brainer. The Syncfusion technical team worked on a core of a couple of hundred entries to provide the critical mass for the FAQ. The source of these entries was the knowledge our team had gained as we developed our Grid and Tools suites.

After the initial push to go live, it quickly became obvious that the online forums and newsgroups were an endless source of new questions and information that we could include in our FAQ. So, I got into a pattern of checking various newsgroups many times a day. As new questions were posted, I quickly decided whether a question would lead to a FAQ entry or not. If so, there was a rush to find a solution, prepare a FAQ, and then get it published to our website before anyone else could respond to the new question on the message board. We actually had an infrastructure available to complete the whole process in only a few minutes.

It became a game for us to see how fast we could go from seeing a question in a forum to posting a “FAQ” solution to the forum thread. We tweaked our FAQ writing and FAQ publishing infrastructure to facilitate responding to forum questions with scripted text referencing FAQ entries. The major piece of the required time was actually solving the issue and verifying it. Once that was done, we could produce and publish a FAQ entry with code snippets and samples to our website in less than two minutes. In some cases, less than 10 minutes after a question was posted on a newsgroup, a response was added to the thread saying you could find a solution in the Syncfusion Windows Forms FAQ .

We have both anecdotal evidence and real evidence that our Windows Forms FAQ was successful beyond our expectations. Because of its success, Syncfusion has since published additional FAQs on ASP.NET and WPF. The Windows Forms FAQ certainly provided major traffic to our website in the early years. Last year, I was having dinner with a group of people from a large Indian consulting firm. One of the senior consultants for the company had this to say: “When I hear Syncfusion, I think of your datagrid FAQ. Whenever I wanted to know how to do something with a datagrid, I found it there. I owe my career to that FAQ.”