Silverlight for line-of-business applications
ComponentOne Silverlight Studio
The Component One Studio for Silverlight control set is available as M1Pre-Release at the time of writing this post. Amongst the few controls sets reviewed, this one stood out because of the sheer breadth of enterprise-quality components it offers.
It contains controls that enable you to create Silverlight based rich interfaces featuring Charts, DataGrids, TreeViews, ImageRotators, and the very versatile Hypepanel that render the popular fish-eye views.
The sample applications included with the component download are helpful for understanding the object models and features supported. The programming approach is a bit complicated because Blend as well as Visual Studio does not offer design view support. So, all the controls need to be added through code-behind. But the suggested workaround of using placeholders is a good solution for this problem.
The difficult part is binding data to controls. Some of the documentation about how to bind data to each of the sub-component is vague at points and some data binding methods, though a part of the object model, are actually not supported. An excellent resource for anyone building trial applications using these controls is the Silverlight Studio forum available through ComponentOne website.
VisiFire
VisiFire is an interesting component set for delivering interactive charts. It is a set of open source data visualization components powered by Microsoft Silverlight.
The diversity of chart types that can be rendered using VisiFire controls is quite broad, broader than the ComponentOne chart control. One very striking advantage is the support available for hovering over chart data point to reveal more details about the data point through a tool-tip type function. This is an important requirement, heavily used by modern day Business Intelligence (BI) consumers and VisiFire does very well on this front.
The downside is the chart component does not support live charts (useful for real-time “what if” type analysis) by auto-generating charts with new data points.
Telerik
The Telerik RadControls for Silverlight is a UI control set for Rich Media Applications and is now available to work with Silverlight 2.0. The control set includes eight full featured controls for developing Menus, TreeViews, Progressbar and a rotating cube. The FAQs on their site suggest that by mid-July they will add some more controls like Calendar, Date Picker and Slider.
From a user experience point of view , the strongest point for these controls is the relative ease with which one can ‘re-skin’ and apply new themes to applications using Microsoft Expression Blend. The downside is the control set still needs widen the base and evolve to add controls like Grids, ComboBoxes and Charts that are part of their ASP.NET AJAX control kit.
Infragistics
Infragistics site suggests that they are very close to offering the community technology preview of their NetAdvantage for Silverlight - Chart and Gauge Silverlight 2 controls. I will review and post a follow up blog after the CTP controls are made public.
Comments
I have tried Visifire and it rocks!
Why should I ever pay for the propitiatory components which cost tons of money?
Posted by: Bill Jones | June 10, 2008 10:28 AM
Just to add to what Chandan had mentioned, there is a promise from Microsoft of releasing nearly 100 Silverlight Controls by the final release. Now, this is not a fancy figure, but one which has been published by Scott Guthrie on his weblog on the release of Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2.
Also, Visifire is an open source chart development framework that for the present doesn't support any real-time analysis. But, this being an "open source" and a "framework", the option of creating a support system for real-time analysis is pretty much possible.
Posted by: Raghu Kishore Vempati | June 10, 2008 12:03 PM
Hey Bill,
I completely agree with you.
Visifire is of industrial strength & i don't have any reason to go with veterans when i can get such cool charts for free from a startup.
Posted by: martin | June 10, 2008 6:32 PM