This chapter provides a complete .NET Graphing overview of the ProEssentials product. It includes info for both WinForm and WebForm interfaces for use with Visual Studio.NET.  

Developers will use the WinForm interfaces when creating stand-alone client side EXEs.  Developers will use the WebForm interfaces within ASP.NET web applications.

WinForm assembly "Gigasoft.ProEssentials.Dll" offers namespaces:

WebForm assembly "Gigasoft.ProEssentialsWeb.Dll" offers namespaces:

Note, the above assemblies are located in the ProEssentials5/DotNet and DotNet20 directories. The DotNet directory holds assemblies compiled with Framework 1.1, and DotNet20 dir holds assemblies compiled with Framework 2.0. You can choose which version to use independent upon which version of Visual Studio used. Though generally, VS2005 developers will want to use the assemblies within DotNet20 dir and VS2003 and earlier developers will want to use the assemblies within the DotNet dir.

Currently we do not offer integrated context sensitive help within Visual Studio.NET. It's recommended you keep this help system open while working with ProEssentials to quicken access to reference materials.   Please note we've taken steps to aid in your current development: there's embedded XML help;  (everything ProEssentials starts with "Pe"); and we've chosen an object model API which is primarily oriented as nested properties and does not force a large understanding of new .NET ideologies to be productive.

Please refer to the ReadMe files, Demo, and Example Projects for additional .NET resources.

Object Model

Intellisense technology will automatically pop up help as needed while you're programming. Our .NET interfaces use nested properties that break up our 1000+ features among 12 main categories. When Intellisense pops up for auto-code completion, you'll see ProEssentials features starting with letters "Pe". This groups them within Intellisense's list box for easier navigation.

The categories are as follows:

Also grouped within Intellisense's list box are our events that also start with "Pe".

Within the property reference material, at the top of each property topic, you'll see a table with various property attributes.  For example, the property FontSize has such an entry.

If developing with either WinForms or WebForms, you'll refer to this property via the .NET row heading.

For a control named Pego1, to programmatically control the FontSize property within code, you'll write...

It is recommended that the namespace: Gigasoft.ProEssentials.Enums be included at the top of your source code files utilizing ProEssentials. In VB.NET, use the Imports keyword, and within C#, use the using keyword. For example:

Imports Gigasoft.ProEssentials.Enums
or
using Gigasoft.ProEssentials.Enums;

Designer Notes

The WinForm interfaces support adapting to changes in the parent form's font and background color. They are designed so that the grid number text size matches that of the other standard controls such as TextBox, Radio Button, and Labels. As long as you don't explicitly change the font and background color, you will be able to change the form's font size and backcolor and all controls on the form will adapt to match. This feature required that we defaulted the properties PeFont.SizeGlobalCntl to .85 and PeFont.Fixed = True. Note that the default form text size of 8 points is fairly small. You may want to increase it to 9 or 10 points depending on your needs. This feature results in a very clean and professional looking user interface where the charting control appears to be a true sibling of the other standard controls.

WebForm vs WinForm Development

The WebForm and WinForm interfaces are very similar, but they do differ in a few events and properties.  This is best outlined within the ASP.NET walkthrough content.  Generally, the only events available have to do with adding imagemap details.  Also, there's a few additional properties to control how content is dynamically rendered.  The WinForm interfaces have many properties related to user interface characteristics.  The WebForms contain these properties only in the event you are rending an ActiveX binary state to be streamed to the browser.  This allows a ProEssentials ActiveX control to be instantiated with the specific user interface desired. Event processing is still handled via ActiveX event processing as described in the ASP Readme file installed with the product.  ProEssentials only supports rending images and ActiveX content via binary streaming.  This is the only mechanism that supports WebFarms efficiently. Passing viewstate back and forth is not good web design for complex objects containing lots of data.  If our competition supports this feature, they also warn against using it as it's not recommended. Due to the high inefficiency, we don't offer a feature to pass viewstate back and forth.