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What are the best open source (open source and commercial) reporting tools for ASP.NET similar to Crystal Reports for ASP.NET?
Microsoft Reporting Services, free and included with SQL Server 2005 and 2008.
Of course, this is great if you need a separation of report design and application, which for Enterprise applications is a huge plus.
However, if what you want is to be able to create "in application" dashboards, where "you" design the reports and have limited parameters you expose to the user, then I suggest looking into "control" based charting vendors like TeeChart .
Pros/cons of each strategy:
Crystal/Microsoft Reporting services will give you out of the box handling of things like report scheduling, export to excel and pdf, and separation between application and report design.
The independent charting tools you can get give you better control, they render better on any size you need, easier to grammatically manipulate and can handle eye candy such as flash based (no flash charts in MS SSRS)
+1 SSRS and ActiveReports. ryw, use ActiveReports and close the gates of Crystal Hell behind you forever.
ActiveReports and DevExpress' reporting tools are both pretty good. The ReportViewer control works too (the price is right), but I find it more difficult to use. And SSRS reports can be embedded into your ASP.Net apps as well.
As much as I despise Crystal Reports (we describe digging deep into it the seven layers of Crystal hell) -- it seems to be the best/most-flexible tool for the job. I hope someone comes along and knocks them off the block though.
Microsoft Reporting Services is an alternative, but didn't have the features we needed.
I would suggest taking a look at MS SSRS (Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services).
I agree that SSRS is generally the right choice. But for flashy and embedded in an HTML page, I like Dundas. Their stuff looks good out of the box, has an easy-to-understand API, and is painless to get up and running.
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I want to create an application GUI that allows a user to create a visual state machine. The interface would work similarly to Microsoft's Visio product, where the user adds blocks or circles (states) and then connects the states with arrow lines denoting a change of state or an event. In the backend, I would like the GUI to create an SCXML file to describe the important connections.
See: SCXML in wikipedia
Here are some other requirements:
Cross Platform (Linux/Windows/MAC OSX)
Open Source
User-friendly
Qt implementation - (preferred, not required)
Here are some related projects:
http://ostatic.org/fsme - Doesn't work with new version of Qt, not well-maintained
http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.6/graphicsview-diagramscene.html - very close, but missing some functionality such as multiple connections between two states.
If there are no other alternatives, I am going to take Qt's Diagram Scene example (above) and modify it to suit my needs.
I would love to know if anyone else knows of a well-supported and well-developed tool for dynamically creating visual state machines.
There is qfsm.
You might want to check the free QM modeling tool at: http://www.state-machine.com/qm. QM has been developed in the latest Qt 4.7 and runs on Windows and Linux platforms. The tool is specifically designed for hierarchical state machines (UML statecharts). If you know other graphical tools of this type (IBM Rhapsody, BoUML, MagicDraw, Enterprise Architect, or even Visio), you will appreciate the ease of creating nested states and routing transitions in QM. The tool generates C or C++ code based on the mature QP state machine frameworks. (Automatic code generation almost always is based on a framework.) QM is targeted mainly for embedded real-time systems.
Have you seen AutomataEditor? It can even do a simulation of an automata work.
It's written in Qt and it's open source.
I think you said
"I want to create an application GUI"
This means you need some framework to build an application..! If I'm correct,
You can take a look at this Javascript framework called JointJS
Its a JavaScript Diagramming Library. This site called FigurePool
is a good example of graph editor GUI built with jointjs! I hope this information will help you.
I'm also using it for Reservation Table Analyzer state machines.
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I am learning ASP.NET and would like to know what are the must have tools for developing in ASP.NET. These can be tools for debugging, testing, desinging or other category you think about. Please be specific to ASP.NET development. I would prefer tools that do not cost money since I am doing that for fun at home. I am already using Visual Web Developer 2008 Express.
Thanks,
Tools:
Either ELMAH or ASP.NET Health Monitoring for error logging
Search Engine Optimization Toolkit
Tip/Trick: Url Rewriting with ASP.NET
Resources:
The Offical ASP.NET site
Scott Guthrie's Blog
Testing:
WatiN
Not specific to ASP.NET, but useful:
LINQPad
Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows
Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now
The Express Editions of Visual Studio are perfectly serviceable for learning ASP.NET.
In terms of specific utilities, I think having a good browser plugin like Firebug (Firefox) or the built-in developer console in Chrome are really handy for seeing whats going in the specific HTML or javascript.
Afterwords, if you find you need functionality thats not in the Express Edition, then upgrading to the full version of Visual Studio is highly recommended.
Something to watch the response and request headers, like Firebug or Fiddler. You can use these to see cookies, caching directives, etc... It's a great way to learn the ins and outs of http, and since you're talking about ASP.NET, you should have a good understanding of the protocol. I'd even take a peruse through RFC 2616, the suggested http standard, though not strictly followed by browsers.
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html
Fiddler: http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/
There's also HttpWatch, but it's not cheap, but there is a basic version.
http://www.httpwatch.com/
Of course there are all those ajax/javascript libraries like jQuery, Prototype, Dojo, MooTools, etc..., though they strictly aren't utilities, but incredibly useful.
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I'm wondering what other tools / frameworks / Add Ons people use to improve their productivity / development speed when coding in ASP.NET.
I just use VS2008 on its own but wanted to find out what other people use with VS2008 AND WHY??
In addition to ReSharper, IE Developer ToolBar and FireBug improves your speed if you're working on javascript and css on your project. Also Fiddler is good tool for debugging puposes.
I use:
GhostDoc: GhostDoc is a free add-in for Visual Studio that automatically generates XML
documentation comments for C#. Either by using existing documentation inherited
from base classes or implemented interfaces, or by deducing comments from
name and type of e.g. methods, properties or parameters.
CodeRush Xpress for Visual Studio: CodeRush Xpress is freely available to all Visual Studio 2008 developers and offers a comprehensive suite of tools that enable you and your team to simplify and shape complex code - making it easier to read and less costly to maintain.
CoolCommands: It contains lots of cool stuff, but I mainly use the font-functionalities like: 'Demo Font' or 'Wheel Font Sizing'. E.g. Demo Font easily switches the font to a size which is perfect for giving demos on a beamer. If you disable it again, your font size is switched back to its original size.
I'm not sure if this counts, but we use CruiseControl.NET for our buildserver, which in the long run, helps productivity as well.
I have used Resharper for a while, and although it does improve productivity, I eventually uninstalled it since it made my Visual Studio too slow. Although I have to admint, that was almost two years ago, so it may have improved since then.
Mine tools are: CodeRush and Refactor, as well as VisualSVN.
Microsoft Expression Web: can open a Visual Studio .Sln file, but is focused on design.
And it is included in my MSDN subscription.
Google Chrome: Has a very nice "Inspect Element" item on the context menu. Amongst other things, the screen will learn you very easy where the CSS properties are coming from.
I'm a big fan of ReSharper, Web Developer Toolkit and Firebug in Firefox, Chrome, GhostDoc and Fiddler (particularly useful for JSON requests). Oh and YSlow.
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First of all - I've seen this question, but mine is a bit different.
What I need is some framework for logging debug information. This information will NOT be present in production environment. It will be used for tracking down performance problems and other generic bugs. Especially for performance problems, so it will be used a lot together with load testing.
Therefore I expect that the logs will have a lot of messages and going through them by hand to find the slow ones is NOT an option.
At first I thought of using the build in Trace facilities of ASP.NET. They even have this great tool which would be perfect for my needs. Unfortunately, it seems that the ASP.NET trace is fundamentally flawed and cannot be relied upon, especially under heavy load. :(
So now I need something else, and it should come with a good analysis tool. Anything you could recommend?
Log4Net is a common logging framework used in FOSS projects.
Other good tools are using Enterprise Library logging and global exception handling (this is useful even in production environments to have.)
I'd also recommend Log4net. You can configure it to output messages to log files, database, etc. If you're looking for a good viewer, you can set up the UdpAppender, and then use a tool like Chainsaw to read the log messages. It's Java based though, so if you really want to avoid it, you could also try Log4net Viewer.
For more information and details on how to set things up, check out Using Chainsaw with Log4net.
Visual Studio Test Edition comes with a lot of what you're talking about.
You could also look into using ANTS from RedGate to profile for performance bottlenecks.
If price is a barrier you'll probably want to go with log4net.
There are a couple parsers for log4net out there.
I would recommend log4Net aswell, you can configure it to use several output types, so you can exactly configure how you like your logs to be created.
You might want to take a look at our logging tool SmartInspect, as it comes with a quite powerful log viewer with filtering capabilities among other things. It also includes example projects for ASP.NET.
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Having not done ASP.NET since v1.1, and now blitzing through the Wrox Pro ASP.NET v3.5 book, what other resources are available to get me developing enterprise ASP.NET apps the fastest?
I've been developing in DotNet since Beta and have been doing Winform & middle-layer architecture/design/dev for 3.5 years now (as this has been my client's desires). But I'm finding my falling behind has hurt me concerning a new client. :(
I'd appreciate any advice on moving forward as fast as possible. I'm looking for anything RAD related or even just great books on the subject that you recommend. Right now, I'm having fun consuming the Wrox book though. Thanx much!
I'd start with the QuickStart tutorials. That'll get you into the code, get you some exposure to the programming, architecture, controls, data access, and so on. You can also watch videos of how to accomplish various tasks in ASP.NET at the ASP.NET web site.
Assuming you already have substantial VB.NET or C# experience, you should get deep into ASP.NET fairly quickly.
Take a look to the ASP.NET Dynamic Data Scaffolding Framework (included in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1), it allows you to build really quickly data driven web applications. Here you can find more good videos and resources about this RAD feature.
Not that easy, since "enterprise" is a word that can encompass lots of things. First off, I would suggest just getting to know which new frameworks are available, both out-of-the-box and not. And there's been a lot of those since .NET 1.1.
WCF, for example. Dynamic Data, as mentioned in another comment. ASP.NET MVC. LINQ, ADO.NET EF, WF.
I'm not suggesting you learn all of them, at least not all at once. Rather, be at least familiar with what they are and what they bring to the table. Browse through the base class library reference and familiarize yourself with the available namespaces. This will help you know what's there and what you will have to write. Try your hand at the bits that interest you.
After you're a bit more well-versed with the .NET framework, it's time to take a look at the other stuff you'll need for enterprise development. Frameworks such as CSLA and NHibernate. Testing stuff like TypeMock. As before just knowing what's out there, even without knowing the details, can help quite a lot.
Write code. Nothing quite like writing code if you want to learn quickly. Choose one of the apps you wrote back in the 1.1 days, and try to write a shorter, cleaner and/or more maintainable version with the new tools at your disposal.
And don't forget to have fun. If you're not enjoying what you're doing, you won't really be learning much. Good luck!
You probably shouldn't mix "enterprise" with "rad" as the two generally have extreme connotations on opposite ends of the spectrum.
Enterprise typically draws up ideas of, large, line-of-business applications, large complexity, large configuration, (and some would probably relate to pain, nightmares, etc..)
RAD typically refers to the drag & drop garbage that you see in awesome conference demos, but then you go back home and try to build and maintain and app built with dragging and dropping controls & data acccess components on your UI and you quickly see that it breaks down.
Pick a good balance of tools & techniques that make you productive, but at the same time don't sacrifice maintainability.
You'll find no shortage of opinions of "how you should work" here on Stack Overflow, but the best advice I can give you is to be pragmatic, read as much as you can stand, and code-code-code. I code on the bus, at home, at work, on a plane, in a hotel room, etc. Try out different tools/frameworks, see what their communities say, try building a simple todo-list app, etc. Get your feel for what's out there.
You're on the right path by reaching out to the community.