ILOG Diagram for .NET is the Cost-effective Choice
When developing a user interface within the .NET ecosystem, some development choices—like using Microsoft Visual Studio—are obvious. For certain types of displays, you may need to consider supplementing the Visual Studio controls with third party products. In these cases, your choices become less obvious.
To ensure you make the best choice, it is important to compare products for features, price, reliability and support. With limited features, poor usability and sparse documentation, the wrong choice can end up costing you a lot of time and money in the long run.
ILOG Diagram for .NET includes a complete set of features for building outstanding diagram and dashboard displays for the desktop and Web. These features can save you several weeks of development time.
The following table shows how ILOG Diagram for .NET compares to other similar products.
| Feature |
Diagrammer for .NET |
Other Similar Products |
| Display types |
- Supports displays with diagrams and dashboards
- Ideal for creating modeling displays (such as graphical editors) and monitoring displays ( the graphics will be updated based on the current state of the display)
|
- Only supports one type of display
|
| Symbols |
- Rich vector and bitmap graphics are supported
- Symbols can be created by graphic designers with their favorite design tools
- Symbols can be animated to react to data changes
- Symbols can be organized on palettes and reused across applications
- Ships with nearly 100 pre-built and ready-to-use symbols
|
- Very crude graphics, difficult to create
|
| Deployment |
- Deploy to the desktop or Ajax-enhanced Web
- The coding done for one platform can be fully leveraged across all deployment platforms
|
- Typically, only supports one platform
- If more than one platform is supported, it requires the purchase of another product with a different architecture
|
| Integration with Microsoft Visual Studio |
- Fully integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (and 2005) for faster development
- Comes with toolbars, palettes and views
- Uses smart tags
- Uses Intellisense
- Includes an integrated graphical editor to create and animate symbols
|
- Offers little or no integration, slowing development and debugging efforts
- Some products that support dynamic symbols use a scripting language, rather than a native .NET language
|
| Support for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) |
- Provides WPF services to process XAML (the XML language of WPF), for easy creation of sophisticated diagram displays.
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