Telerik Q1.2012 XAML Controls are here!
And one of the most interesting new pieces there is the Diagramming control/framework. It is a product of joint venture between Telerik and our awesome partner - Orbifold.
RadDiagram brings lots of new and exiting possibilities to both WPF and Silverlight worlds. In this post I'll show off what RadDiagram is and how you can best use it for number of different applications. Let's first take a look and play with it.
RadDiagram is very extensible and flexible Control (part of the Telerik.Windows.Controls.Diagrams assembly). It mimics the intrinsic ItemsControl and has two major types of children:
RadDiagram also brings you all the XAML goodies you are used to plus much more features you'd love. Let me just name a few:
But behind all that XAML goodies, there is a rich Diagramming Framework (Telerik.Windows.Diagrams.Core) that deals with the core objects and functionality - I call that Graph Object Model (GOM). This framework is platform independent and can be easily reused across other .Net technologies. The tricky part here is that the core framework and services depends only on bunch of interfaces and not on the real classes. This gives us a good chance to reuse the core in multiple platforms.
There are hundreds of different diagrams and thousands of different types of diagramming applications. There are tons of features that can be added to a diagram control, but they are not the same for each and every type of diagram. That is why we tried to add only the most common and reusable features to the RadDiagram and leave a lot of places for extensibility. RadDiagram is just your starting point, but then you'll have to add some custom (business) logic and rules, custom layout algorithms and custom types of shapes and connections. For example our four major samples in the public demos site have also some custom, in place logic that is different.
You can take a look at the beautiful Class Diagram example that shows the entire RadDiagram class structure.
This is just the beginning of a series of posts regarding RadDiagram, so you'd better stay tuned. Your feedback and comments are more than welcome.
Miro Miroslavov is XAML enthusiast. You can follow him on Twitter at @mmiroslavov.