Reviews

Review: ILOG Gantt for .NET

• By Mike Gunderloy
• March 23, 2004

ILOG Gantt for .NET
starting at $3750
ILOG
Moutain View, California
(650) 567-8000
www.ilog.com

If you've ever looked at Microsoft Project, you know what a Gantt chart is: it's that series of little bars representing activities and lines representing dependencies that your manager uses to explain how you're holding up the whole project. ILOG Gantt for .NET is a set of Windows Forms components, and associated support classes, that you can use to bring Gantt charts to your own applications.

There are actually quite a few controls here that all work together. In addition to the Gantt chart, there's also a Schedule chart (for showing time-oriented resource reservations), as well as a batch of constituent controls that build up these more complex charts, and other goodies such as a load chart and a time scale. These can all be recombined and even extended (there are excellent tutorials on how to do this) to build much more than just a Project clone in your application. Any time you want to display reservations or dependencies or the way that a batch of small things fit into big timeslots, this product probably has the pieces you need.

Underneath it all there's a modified MVC programming model, with interfaces specified for everything that you need to worry about. They provide an in-memory implementation of the necessary interfaces to get you started (and, once again, instructions on extending it) as well as built-in XML serialization. Another nice touch is classes to convert from a standard DataSet to the in-memory model that ILOG Gantt for .NET expects, so you can hook your charts up to anything that will supply you with a DataSet.

The quality of both the library and the supporting materials is excellent - this is easily one of the best-designed and -documented .NET libraries I've ever seen. Installation was trouble-free, and left me with a batch of controls in the toolbox. This wasn't overwhelming because the help is great, and there are sample applications and quickstarts as well as a full set of tutorials. A lot of thought has clearly gone into making this product flexible as well as powerful, and I like the way that it ended up: the default controls will work well for most people, but when you need to do something extra you probably can.

If you've got a need for these controls in your next .NET application, you can sign up for an evaluation at the company's Web site.