Anne Marsan: Software for Engineers

A customer asked me to write a very small application that performs some operations on 2D parametric curves. While their code base for their primary software is C++ Win32, I thought this would be a great opportunity to show off C#.Net to them, but that meant coming up with a basic graphics library that would allow me to display (x,y) data as a spline curve or polyline, toggle control points display, and perhaps do some zooming and panning. While the customer is willing to pay for a 3rd party library if the price and feature set are right, I thought I'd look into open source libraries to see what's out there. That's how I discovered ZedGraph.

ZedGraph is billed as a charting library (it can do X-Y, bar and pie charts), but it's X-Y graphing functionality is solid enough to make it appropriate for a basic 2D graphics app. One of my big concerns was the ability to exert control over the scaling along the X and Y axes. I want to be able to force a 1:1 aspect ratio between the X and Y scaling so that the curves that I'm plotting aren't distorted. ZedGraph allows me to set the minimum and maximum values along an axis, but then it takes care of the rest. If I'm showing the axes and a grid behind my curves, ZedGraph automatically figures out where to put tick marks and major and/or minor grid lines.

Naturally I want to be able to control the color and style of the plotted curves, the type of symbol used to represent curve control points, the axes titles, the chart title,  the gridline color, etc. This is very intuitive in ZedGraph, because the architecture of the library and the names of the properties and methods make sense.

Zooming and panning functionality is available by default in the .Net UserControl that comes along with the library. Best of all, the functionality mimics that of many well-known graphics software apps (like ANSYS and Unigraphics).

Finally, the documentation and examples available at the ZedGraph website are decent enough to get the novice beyond setting up a basic graph. I was able to follow the examples to get the look, feel, and functionality my customer required in place within a few hours.

I haven't played around with the library long enough to discover its limitations - I'm sure they're there! But for a very basic 2D graphics app, this library is an excellent choice.