.NET 7 WinForms News

Speed up Chart Rendering with GPU Acceleration

July 14, 2025
Gigasoft ProEssentials uses Direct3D rendering to boost performance by offloading intensive tasks to the GPU, enabling faster scene construction.

Gigasoft ProEssentials is a robust charting library for Windows development, providing a wide array of 2D and 3D chart types. The product offers a versatile suite of components, such as Graph, Scientific Graph, and 3D Scientific Graph, enabling the creation of sophisticated visualizations. It's extensive support for various platforms and development environments, including WPF, WinForm, and integration with popular IDEs like Visual Studio, enhances flexibility and empowers developers to efficiently visualize data within their applications.

The Gigasoft ProEssentials provides Direct3D rendering, significantly enhancing scene construction performance. By leveraging the parallel processing power of the GPU, this feature accelerates the rendering process compared to traditional CPU-based methods. This results in faster visualization of complex scenes, improved responsiveness, and a more efficient use of system resources, ultimately enabling developers to create more performant and visually impressive applications.

Gigasoft ProEssentials is licensed per developer and is available as a perpetual license with free technical support and maintenance for the life of the version. See our Gigasoft ProEssentials licensing page for full details.

For more information, visit our Gigasoft ProEssentials product page.

Display Report Metrics in Meaningful Formats

July 7, 2025
Stimulsoft Reports.NET 2025.3.1 adds flexible Value Type customization options for displaying values, percentages, and target pairs.

Stimulsoft Reports.NET is a reporting tool that empowers developers to design, edit, view, export, and print reports of varying complexity. It features a user-friendly report designer and an interactive viewer, allowing connection to various data sources. The generated reports can be seamlessly integrated into both Windows Forms and ASP.NET applications, with export capabilities to numerous formats for maximum flexibility.

The Stimulsoft Reports.NET 2025.3.1 update enhances the Value Type property by allowing developers to customize how values are displayed in Progress and Indicator dashboard elements. Progress elements can now show raw values, percentages, or value and target pairs, while Indicator elements support raw values or value and target formats. This added flexibility helps developers present data in the most relevant format for their users, improving clarity and making dashboards more informative and purpose-driven.

To see a full list of what's new in 2025.3.1, see our release notes.

Stimulsoft Reports.NET is licensed per developer and is available as a perpetual license with 1 year support and maintenance. See our Stimulsoft Reports.NET licensing page for full details.

Stimulsoft Reports.NET is available in the following products:

Visualize Trends with Compact Sparklines

July 7, 2025
Sparklines in grids deliver quick visual insights by displaying data trends within cells, enhancing clarity, comparison and decision-making.

Sparklines are small embedded charts displayed within individual cells of a data grid or table, offering a compact and intuitive way to visualize trends, patterns and variations in data. Unlike traditional charts, sparklines are designed to fit alongside text or numerical values, providing immediate visual context without taking up additional space. This makes them ideal for high density dashboards and reports where space efficiency and quick interpretation are important. By enabling users to scan and compare trends across multiple rows at a glance, sparklines support faster decision making and improved data comprehension. Common use cases include tracking stock performance over time, visualizing monthly sales trends, monitoring temperature fluctuations or comparing website traffic across multiple pages directly within the grid.

Several .NET Winforms grid controls offer support for sparklines including:

  • NOV Grid for .NET lets you embed sparklines directly into grid cells, enabling real-time trend visualization and compact data analysis.
  • Infragistics WinDataGrid (part of Infragistics Ultimate UI for Windows Forms) allows you to present performance trends within rows using sparklines, improving clarity and insight.
  • FlexGrid for WinForms (part of ComponentOne Studio WinForms by MESCIUS) facilitates data interpretation by integrating sparklines into each row for immediate visual context.
  • DevExpress WinForms Data Grid (part of DevExpress WinForms) enables compact graphical summaries with sparklines, allowing users to easily detect patterns.

Compare .NET Winforms Grid Controls

Add Dynamic Grouping to Your Reports

June 27, 2025
ActiveReports v19.1 adds powerful grouping capabilities, enabling report authors to build customizable, interactive layouts with zero code changes.

ActiveReports.NET from MESCIUS, is a comprehensive reporting solution for developers building applications in .NET. It empowers you to design and deliver visually appealing reports through user-friendly designers and a wide range of controls. ActiveReports simplifies report creation and distribution with a versatile API, rich data source connectivity, and support for multiple export formats. This translates to increased developer productivity and improved end-user experience with powerful reporting functionalities within your .NET applications.

The ActiveReports v19.1 update introduces enhanced grouping control that allows developers to enable or hide groups in Tables, BandedLists, and Tablix controls based on expressions or parameters. This capability makes it easier to design reports that adapt at runtime to different data scenarios or user inputs, without requiring code changes. By configuring the new "Enabled" and "Hidden" properties directly within the report definition, developers can deliver more flexible and maintainable reporting solutions that respond dynamically to business logic.

To see a full list of what's new in v19.1, see our release notes.

ActiveReports.NET is licensed per developer and is available with or without a 12 month support and maintenance subscription. See our ActiveReports.NET licensing page for full details.

Learn more on our ActiveReports.NET product page.

Capture Documents Exactly as Displayed

June 24, 2025
Printing and saving to PDF ensures your application can generate reliable, high-quality documents regardless of the operating environment.

Printing to PDF allows users to save an existing document, webpage, or file as a PDF by using a virtual printer. It captures the document exactly as it would appear if printed, preserving the formatting, layout, and styling. The resulting document is typically static and cannot be edited, ideal for archiving or sharing finalized versions of a document. This feature is particularly useful for standardizing outputs across different software, ensuring consistent presentation, and providing an easy way to generate PDFs from files that do not natively support the format.

Several WinForms PDF controls offer the ability to print/save to PDF including:

  • Telerik UI PDF for WinForms (part of Telerik UI for WinForms) enables developers to print or export UI content directly to PDF files with layout fidelity and output options.
  • ComponentOne Studio WinForms PDF (part of ComponentOne Studio WinForms by MESCIUS) offers native support for saving forms, controls, and reports as PDF.
  • LEADTOOLS PDF provides a robust API for printing or exporting documents to PDF, supporting both vector and raster content, with configurable print settings and security options.
  • ImageGear for .NET by Accusoft allows saving rendered documents or image-based content directly to PDF formats, with control over compression and output resolution.

For an in-depth analysis of features and price, visit our WinForms PDF controls comparison.

Compare WinForms PDF Controls