Successful using of windows custom and user controls embedded into WEB pages to show link analysis.

Just finish today custom control that use GDI+ to show link analysis outcome in several visualization forms (circle, segmentation, hierarchic, etc'). We need to show about 1000 nodes * 1000 links and all the commercial tools that we check (such as tom sawyer) failed to do it in less then 2 second. Eventually we found out that using GDI+ result in sufficient response time. Yes, its enterprise application and all the clients got .Net framework installed on them.

The custom control embedded into user control that controls the custom control visualization form and also handles data transformation since the user can filter visualization data. The custom control embedded inside web form which is part of web application that display the raw data and provide the user several abilities regarding the visualization display (saving, loading view).

It was pretty easy to create the visualization and visualization manipulation (zoom, moving of nodes and relative links, rotating, etc') using GDI+. GDI+ provides reach classes that save most of the work but enables using win32 API if needed. It's also recommend to use GUID attribute for user control class, create cab file that will register user control into GAC and register user control as COM using regasm tool. To embed user control in web page use the object tag but with the old syntax of com object (<OBJECT ID="try" classid="clsid:user control guid attribute value" codebase="mycab.cab#version=0,0,0,0">). Using this method prevent problems with IE 6.0 clients running your user control.