Woody Pewitt - DevExpress Analytics Blog

We are excited to be delivering the DXPivotGrid for Silverlight in the next upcoming release. The Silverlight version of the Pivot Grid is built using the same code base that DXPivotGrid for WPF is built on so we have a rich set of features and proven code base.

The screen shot below shows two versions of the DXPivotGrid for Silverlight, you can see many features including the ability to display the Prefilter so end users have a rich mechanism to display just the data they are interested in.

Let me know what you think and how you may use this new version of the Pivot Grid.

Last week I managed to talk Bryan and Seth in to helping me walk through the capabilities that the DevExpress set of controls that we think of as our Analytics controls. I would like to thank them for the help and participation and I hope this will help explain the value that creating rich analytics and data visualization in to your applications.

As always please let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Today I had the honor of hosting Chris "Woody" Woodruff of Deep Fried Bytes fame and while I was concerned that there would be mass confusion with two Woodys on the same webinar it all worked out great.

Woody’s topic was “Sailing the Ocean of 1’s and 0’s” and I have to admit I did not know what to expect but I knew it would be great and I was not disappointed at all! I especially enjoyed the discussion around data visualization he even used an example of visualization of data that I think is the best of all time (Charles Joseph Minard’s “Grande Armée as it marches to Moscow and back”).

click to see resolution‎ of image

You can watch the webinar in it’s entirety or look below for the slides.

Update: I had to swap out the image of Minard’s “Grande Armée as it marches to Moscow and back” as the image I had used vanashed off the web but now you can click on the image a get an extreamly high reslution image

I recently posted two blog posts about some incremental updates to the DXPivotGrid Improvements for WPF Pivot Grid and More UI enhancements for Pivot Grid and I have gotten some nice feedback. I also created a video that shows how function and look at runtime.

Enjoy!

In the recent release of 2011 Volume 1.7 the DXPivotGrid got the addition of a neat new future that will allow for more data to be viewed. As you can see in the animation below the default for the for the horizontal scrollbar is to move all columns but not the row headers. With the new feature you can set the new property FixedRowHeaders to false and then (again as showed below) all the columns including the row headers will move with the horizontal scrollbar. This is especially useful when the RowTotalsLocation property is set to Near or Far and there are a lot of fields in the column area.

We hope this will provide you with more flexibility in how you use the DXPivotGrid. Let us know what you think.

While we are constantly improving the Pivot Grid I wanted to call out two new enhancements to the WPF version. In past versions the scrolling behavior could lead users to not be able to see certain types of information in the row header and the column header could get lost when scrolling the the data within the pivot grid.

We have now made the text in the column headers move to stay in view as the data area is scrolled left and right.

We have also made the text in the row headers move to stay in view as the data area is scrolled up and down when the property PivotGridControl.RowTotalsLocation is set to Far or Near. There will be no change to behavior when PivotGridControl.RowTotalsLocation is set to the default of Tree.

In this screen shot you can see the default view of the DXPivotGrid with the horizontal and vertical scroll bars at the starting positions of top left.

In this screen shot you can see in past versions as soon as the data area was scrolled even one column and/or row the row and column headers text would get scrolled out of view.

Now in this screen shot you see the new behavior when scrolled (headers still visible)

This new functionality is now available (as of v2011 vol 1.5) to current subscribers.

We hope you will find this a nice enhancement to the pivot grid for your users, please let us know what you think.

Today I did a webinar on the customization options available to end users in the WinForms version of the Pivot Grid (XtraPivotGrid).

We first walked through the PivotGridControl Elements that the user can see and interact with. I also talked about the Customization Forms and how the layout of it can be changed. I did not show (and I should have) how using the ShowingCustomizationForm Event you can set the Customization Form’s Parent property to have the Customization Form hosted on the form with the pivot grid. You can see an example of this in the WinFroms Pivot Grid demos (look for the OLAP Browser demo).

We also looked at the Filter Editor for the Prefilter, while this feature would only be for advanced users it is a incredibly powerful feature. And finally we looked at how Saving and Restoring the pivot grids layout can be accomplished.

I am sorry for the audio my microphone must have not been working properly.

Yesterday DevExpress hosted an excellent webinar on Data Mining with Analysis Services.

You can check watch the online recording of the webinar at http://tv.devexpress.com/#AnalysisServicesDataMining. Peter also wanted to make the slides available and you can download them here Taking Your Application To The Next Level With SQL Server Data Mining.

I want to thank Peter and all of the attendees of this webinar I know I learned a lot and will now be digging in to a whole new part of Analysis Services. If you watch it please let us know you think of it.

Register now for Peter Myers' upcoming webinar on:

Taking Your Application Design to the Next Level with Analysis Services Data Mining

Webinar Details

• Subject: Taking Your Application Design to the Next Level with Analysis Services Data Mining
• Date: Tuesday, July 26th, 2011
• Time: 10am PDT (GMT -07:00)
• Length: 1 hour (or so)
• Presenter: Peter Myers (SolidQ) 
• Level: 100

Data mining as a technology supports the discovery of patterns and statistics not easily visible in relational database queries, and in many cases these patterns can be used to deliver predictions. These patterns can be used to derive knowledge about data, and in turn this knowledge can be used to enhance application designs and the user experience.

In this presentation you will be introduced to Analysis Services 2005 and 2008 Data Mining and numerous demonstrations that show how to develop data mining models that can be embedded into your applications. Demonstrations will be based on Analysis Services 2008 R2 Data Mining and Visual Studio 2010.

This presentation is a must for any developer looking to embed “Artificial Intelligence” into their solution design to take their applications to the next level. It is designed to thrill you with potential, and excite you with the ease in which it can be accomplished. The demonstrations range from simple (involving no code!) to more sophisticated examples.

This presentation is targeted at developers with an interest in data mining, and equally for non-developers interested to understand and evaluate what data mining could achieve for them. There is no requirement to have any background or experience with data mining technologies.

Register Now

Register for this webinar here and learn about analysis services data mining.

About Peter

Peter Myers has 13 years' solid experience working in OLTP database design and development, DBA support and Data Warehousing/Business Intelligence with SQL Server.

Specializing in Microsoft Business Intelligence, Peter provides mentoring, technical training and course content authoring for SQL Server and Office. Specifically he works with Integration Services, Analysis Services (cubes and data mining), Reporting Services, Excel, PowerPivot and PerformancePoint Services.

He has a broad business background supported by a bachelor degree in applied economics, and he extends this with current MCITP and MCT certifications. He has been an MVP since 2006.

Register now for this informative and interesting webinar. I'll be there as the DevExpress Analytics evangelist to help answer your questions too.

A short while back we had a question come though the DevExpress Support Center, the question was how apply a custom appearance to a set of cells, corresponding to the same Field Values. Even and odd sets of cells should be colorized with different colors.

You can see in this screen shot that every other set of columns of the data in this pivot grid get the GreenYellow color applied. To accomplish this task we can compare Field Values, corresponding to a processed cell, with Field Values, corresponding to a previous cell. The GetFieldValue method is used to get Field Values by a column index.

The entire example is How to customize appearance of the Even/Odd groups of cells I am sure if you are trying to make data more visible for yours users this type of user interface enhancement will be met with good response from your users\customers.

Let me know how you use this in your solution and Enjoy!

With the upcoming 11.1 release we have added new improvements to the layout serialization capabilities of the ASP.NET Pivot Grid control. This will give much better control of how you can stream the current layout of a pivot grid, this will give you better capabilities to persist your users layouts. If you have used our WinForms Pivot Grid you may already be familiar with the type of options we will be providing in the ASP.NET pivot grid.

There are also a host of new events that will allow you to controls the layout process which can be of help when reloading a layout from a serialized stream.

We hope you can use these new capabilities to make your users experience more compelling.

We are excited to show our Scrolling Performance Enhancements, these enhancements apply to the WPF Pivot Grid. This performance enhancement was accomplished by significantly improving the scrolling algorithms in this release. The result is the scrolling can be up to five times faster in layouts that contain 300 columns, 1200 rows, and 60 data fields. The performance enhancements will very depending on the shape and size of your data but we are confidant you will see the difference.

Below is a comparison time line of scrolling performance in 10.2 vs 11.1.

We hope you will enjoy the new responsiveness this will give the Pivot Grid.

In the upcoming release of the WPF PivotGrid control we have added a new event that will allow you to customize the appearance of field value cells. From this event you can specify the brushes used to paint the background and foreground of the processed field value cell.

In past versions there was a similar event that when combined with this new event gives many new ways to conditionally customize the visual presentation of WPF Pivot Grid elements.

You can see in the example How to customize the appearance of cells that with the existing event, CustomCellAppearance, how you can use the PivotCustomCellAppearanceEventArgs argument witch will give you the PivotCellBaseEventArgs class to modify properties related to the Cell. Now with the new CustomValueAppearance event you will get the PivotCustomValueAppearanceEventArgs argument witch will give you the PivotFieldValueEventArgs class to customize column and row headers.

You can see from the table below that each event gives you different sets of properties that when used together can be used to create rich data presentations for your users like the image blow the table.

We hope you can use this new functionality to bring better and richer solutions to your users.

Are you going? It’s time again for CodeStock I am super excited to be going to CodeStock for the first time. Myself, Seth and our great video guy Jeff will be headed to Knoxville on Thursday June 2nd and getting to enjoy the full experience.

I will be doing two sessions:

The Basics of Developing for the web for Windows Developers
In the past I have called this talk “Port 80 to Web Apps” and I try in the given time to explain the part of web development that a lot of developers don’t consider. Yes that means talking about HTTP and TCP/IP so there can be appreciation of al the relevant moving parts and not just the code we all hack at.

Rich data visualization with DevExpress
With this talk I will show how to build compelling user experiences for end users that can provide rich, flexible and manageable solutions.

I hope if you will be at CodeStock you come find me and let me know how you are solving data visualization for your customer. If you would like to schedule some dedicated time for a conversation please let me know.

With 11.1 we took some time to enhance many core scenarios in the pivot grid product. I Have covered some of the enhancements in the posts:

Collapsed State Memory Consumption Improvements (coming in v2011.1)
Unbound Field Values Memory Consumption Improvements (coming in v2011.1)

But there is more to cover… You can see the full list of new features at the What's New in DXperience v2011 vol 1 pages.

Here is a video of the improvements made to exporting and print preview for 11.1. I hope you enjoy!

More to come soon…