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.

Following BUILD, there is still some angst surrounding Silverlight and the role it will play moving forward. This is understandable after hearing that Silverlight does not run inside the Metro-UI IE browser. There are good reasons why supporting Silverlight under the Metro-UI browser is not a great idea and I believe that Microsoft was right to stay away from it.

Microsoft released Silverlight in 2007 in order to: (1) make rich Internet applications (RIA) easier to deploy and (2) enable cross-platform development. Silverlight achieved its seamless deployment goal. However, since cross-platform adoption never panned out, Silverlight became a de facto Windows only solution.

Moving forward, I believe Silverlight only makes sense on legacy projects. If you are starting a new project with Silverlight, you should evaluate all available options. It is a good choice only if deployment concerns are paramount (XBAP deployment is not as seamless as Silverlight). Even when deployment is your primary concern, definitely consider an ASP.NET MVC solution as an alternative option. There is excellent tooling support for ASP.NET MVC and you can be very productive. You get excellent deployment characteristics and a cross-platform mobile story.

In all other scenarios, I believe WPF is a much better choice for a desktop UI. You can stick to a subset of WPF and produce a UI that looks great and offers excellent performance while sharing code with its WinRT twin. WPF will easily out-perform Silverlight (especially when dealing with large amounts of data) if you take advantage of WPF-specific features such as support for lower level rendering primitives (this is one of the reasons that not all of our WPF and Silverlight controls share the same code).

Syncfusion will keep adding functionality as well as supporting Silverlight. Our XAML team is integrated; most functionality will continue to be added to both Silverlight and WPF. Syncfusion has always maintained separate WPF and Silverlight codebases when it comes to solutions that required deep integration with WPF (such as the grid and chart controls). These controls will be independently enhanced for newer versions of Silverlight and WPF.

Interested in more of my post-BUILD analysis, read my latest whitepaper: “Windows 8: What it means for development decisions today and in the future.”

Syncfusion started with a simple goal–to produce and actively support enterprise-class Microsoft .NET software components. When we started, the .NET platform was young and there was a lot of discussion about its future. Syncfusion’s core group of engineers had worked for years with C++, specifically the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) environment. Battle hardened as they were by unresolved symbols, memory leaks, out-of-date pre-compiled headers, and the many quirks of the Win32 platform, they saw .NET as a breath of fresh air. There was little doubt in their minds that the .NET platform would profoundly change Windows development and change it for the better.

Over the next 10 years, the .NET platform did change Windows development. Developer productivity soared. Components became first-class citizens and promoted reuse in a manner that was not easily possible until then. Syncfusion was fortunate to be a part of this revolution. In many ways, we had front-row seats. Each new release of the platform and our own products brought additional challenges and opportunities to our doorstep. We went from shipping one product on one platform (our grid control on Windows Forms) to shipping 20 products on 6 different platforms (the latest addition being Windows Phone 7). We ventured beyond user interface controls into markets such as reporting and business intelligence. We have been truly privileged to be a part of the .NET eco-system for the past 10 years and to have participated in its tremendous growth.

While we added products, gained thousands of customers, and ventured into new areas, our values did not change–our model of interactive development continues to be at the heart of everything we do. New customers are always pleasantly surprised by how we react to bug reports and feature requests. They tell us they are impressed with our unwavering commitment to ensuring speedy resolution even when the cost to Syncfusion is high, and they are surprised by the depth and completeness of prototypes that our technical teams provide. They love it when we attend web meetings and work for hours to resolve issues that show up only under special environments that are virtually impossible to create  in any other scenario. While we offer the widest set of business components on the market today, nothing defines Syncfusion more to our customers than our model of interactive development. This is something we will improve and enhance over the coming 10 years and will never change or compromise.

As a company, we believe that the component market is still young. There are many, many miles to go. We are firmly committed to this market and our customers. We recently shipped a complete HTML5-based diagramming solution and a complete suite of controls for the Windows Phone 7 platform. We were the first vendor to produce a truly enterprise quality standards-based reporting solution for the .NET platform. As I write this, we are preparing to ship one of our biggest releases yet– Syncfusion Essential Studio 2011 Volume 3. We are not slowing down anytime soon. You can expect to see solid releases every quarter—releases that provide more and more building blocks for all of your software development needs.

Thank you for reading and supporting us all these years. We look forward to working with you.

Our Business Intelligence suite has become very popular in the past few years.  It seems like we have hit a nerve- customers are telling us they want business intelligence, but don’t want a large enterprise application.  Something simple, something they can imbed into their own application and follow their own look and feel.  Often, they just want a bit more control.

If you have been thinking along these lines, take a quick look at our offering. 

Our Controls:

• Support ASP.NET, WPF and Silverlight

• Are very lightweight

• Allow you to skin them as you wish

• Support SSAS and XMLA

We are very excited about our latest release, 9.2. In it, we have broken the ice and started developing to the HTML5 standard, we have created a map control and we are offering enhanced support for loading Excel files into our WPF and Silverlight grids. You can now create applications in Silverlight that have an Excel look and feel. This video focuses on just the User Interface portion of our suite.

• HTML 5 Diagram for MVC
• Maps for WPF and Silverlight
• Excel import for WPF and Silverlight Grid
• Ribbon control for ASP.NET
• Hierarchy support in MVC grid
• Spell checker for all platforms
• Cardview for WPF
• Sparkline charts for WinForms