ComponentArt

The usability and value of most modern dashboards becomes seriously questioned if the data shown is fixed, and the user does not have the ability to zoom in or drill-down into the data to a more detailed view.  Implementing this functionality can sometimes be a time consuming task - a...

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WcfServiceDataProvider is a handy new control introduced to the Silverlight and WPF suite of controls in the 2010.1 release.  The control is somewhat different from most of the other controls.  It has no visual aspect to it (hence the pictureless blog post) and its sole purpose is to simplify the task of...

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  Along with ComponentArt UI Framework 2010.1 for Silverlight and WPF comes fantastic new funtionality for our ItemFlow control, the ability to utilize live XAML content within ItemFlowItems. This brings to bear endless possiblities, anything from a simple form wizard spanning multiple ItemFlowItems to nesting an entire ItemFlow within an ItemFlowItem....

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With Web.UI 2010, ComponentArt has introduced the ability to quickly apply a pre-built stylized design to UI controls in the form of Themes.  This allows developers to concentrate on the functional behavior of the control, as design concerns are essentially moved into CSS.  This has the added benefit of cleaning...

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As my previous blog post mentioned, the sophisticated axis annotation mechanism is one of the most useful features of the Silverlight Chart control released with Web.UI 2009.3.  It allows the programmer to just drop the data into the chart and not worry too much about how the axis annotation labels...

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  This blog post lists all the chart types that Silverlight Chart supports. They are divided into several sections: bar charts, pie and doughnut charts, area charts, line charts, marker and bubble charts and financial charts. Next to each chart type illustration we provide the XAML code block that generated it. Bar Charts The following bar chart...

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As most people reading these blogs are aware by now, the recently released Web.UI 2009.3, introduces a powerful Silverlight Gauges control.  One of the features that makes this control really powerful is the ability to insert additional Silverlight controls within a gauge. The idea is for these controls to be fitted...

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In my previous blog post, Silverlight Chart Drilldown: Part One, I described the steps necessary to create a drill-down chart using ComponentArt's Silverlight Chart. To navigate backwards to higher levels of drill-down we used a simple button that would take us back one level at a time. In this blog...

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Standard Silverlight Slider comes with the baked-in numeric axis. While this is sufficient for working with, well, numeric data, it requires extra plumbing to map numeric values to any other data type or collection of data points, including writing a value converter for use in data binding. Apart from having an...

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  The SOA.UI library has, since its introduction, defined its standard UI-serving services not only in terms of interfaces and DataContracts, but as a set of base classes to be inherited. This approach provides the automatic inheritance of the relevant interface and DataContract, but also allows for more helpful functionality to be...

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One question that pops up surprisingly often is how to embed a TreeView control (or any other, but TreeView owes its dominant popularity to Outlook navigation pane) inside a NavBar panel and have it fill up the whole panel. This proved trickier than it seems, as NavBar would allow the...

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The Silverlight Upload control has, up until 2003.3 SP 1 required the inclusion of System.Web.Silverlight.dll and the use of the Silverlight ASP control. This requirement is due to the fact that Silverlight Upload requires two values provided via the InitParams tag, CartUploadId and CartTargetUrl. Things have changed and now Silverlight Upload gives...

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  By default the Menu will attempt to position all sub-menu drop-downs inside of the Silverlight plug-in area.  Sometimes this is not the desired behaviour, in this example the Menu.Clip feature will be used to achieve a neatly aligned appearance.   Figure 1, the problem: Setting a clip on the Silverlight Menu control gives...

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  A bit of time has passed since we introduced the SOA.UI framework for writing web services that drive the UI. Integration with this elegant framework has become an important part of Web.UI for Silverlight, but our AJAX controls also contain quite a bit of functionality for seamlessly plugging into the SOA.UI...

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We just shipped Web.UI 2009.3, which introduces the Silverlight Charting control.  Besides the obvious advantages of client-side rendering and many new look and animation related configurations, the Chart control still offers many of the standard features of our ASP.NET Charting control.  One of these features is the ability to customize...

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  In the recently published 2009.3 release of Web.UI for AJAX, one of the major enhancements to the ever-popular Grid control (now officially named DataGrid) is optimized client-side rendering and the addition of a new "ultra-light" rendering mode. This post will clarify the details of these improvements. Background Thanks to the generally very well...

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As most people are by now aware, the recently released Web.UI 2009.3, introduces a Silverlight Charting control.  Although the main reasons for using the charting control is to visually display the relationship between data, at times this may not be enough on its own.  Sometimes you want to display additional...

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When using line charts, it is often desirable to further highlight the data-point in context by superimposing a marker on top. In this post, I will illustrate how to easily display data-point markers while utilizing mouse events. Basic Chart Start with your basic line chart (in this example we will use a chart...

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  As of version 2009.3, ComponentArt DataGrid for Silverlight has out-of-the-box support for searching and filtering, with all the accompanying UI and API control. To enable filtering through the UI, we set DataGrid's ShowColumnFilters property to true. The availability of a filter dropdown for each column can be further controlled by changing...

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Often, when you are viewing visual data, it is necessary to highlight and select a data-point to obtain context specific information for more granular analysis. In this post, I will illustrate how to highlight and select a specific data-point with ease. Create a Basic Chart As always, start with a basic chart: <ca:Chart x:Name="Chart1"...

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One of Chart's most powerful features is the ability to define custom templates for data-point popups.    In this post, I will cover defining a basic data-point popup, as well as attaching and displaying more complex data.   Start Simple   Start with a simple chart: <ca:Chart x:Name="Chart1" XValue="Area" ChartKind="RoundedBlock" Width="600" Height="400"> <ca:Chart.DataSeries> ...

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    This blog post will demonstrate how to use the drilldown capability of the Silverlight Chart control. Silverlight Chart Drilldown: Part Two and Part Three will show how to integrate Chart drilldown with a BreadCrumb control and a RangeSlider control respectively. We will create a bare-bones drilldown chart with three drill...

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When we launched our 2009 Silverlight Coding Competition back in June, we didn't quite know what to expect. Silverlight was still relatively new and participation required real effort on the part of contestants, so we weren't sure if we were going to get enough signups to make things interesting. Well,...

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As you may know by now, late on Friday (or more precisely early on Saturday) we shipped a major release, UI Framework 2009.3, containing our brand-new suite of Silverlight Charting and Visualization controls. We are quite proud of what we were able to achieve. We really pushed Silverlight 3 to its...

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