Folks, I think I have a small lesson in marketing for you, or it's a commentary on human nature.
For over a year we used the Visifire 2.2.4 charting library for Silverlight. Six months ago we had to move to ComponentOne because they provided gauges and radar charts, at a cost of about $1500/year with support. Although the C1 library seems to have more chart types and more properties (and hence more complexity and documentation) than Visifire, it looks as dull as dishwater. The Visifire charts have pleasant animations so that bars "spring" elastically and pie charts "unwind" into view. Visifire also has tooltips over the data points to show the values. C1 has none of this and you have to do it all in code, and it's so obscure we had to get C1 support to kindly give us some sample code to customise rendering. As a result of this move from Visifire to C1, users and sales have complained that the "springy" charts have gone away and it's all "dull". The architect has said "the idiots don't care what the numbers are on the charts, they just want to have eye-candy". I can understand this. So we have to put in dual-support so that you can choose between Visifire and C1 (where equivalents are available). Visifire V2 didn't have radar charts and gauges, but they do now in V4, possibly invalidating the purchase and migration to C1. What timing eh?! I just noticed that Visifire V4 charts have the text Visifire Trial Edition in the top right corner and the download page says it's a 30 day trial edition. I can't tell if it actually expires after 30 days or if it's just a legal warning. In V2 there was a property to change or hide the text and I have the source code. V4 developer licence(s) cost from $400 to $2500 and there is no free version any more. Greg
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