You can find a plethora of Gantt chart applications for end-users. In fact, I was impressed at just how many shareware Gantt chart applications I found online, not counting Excel add-ins and a wealth of other implementations. All this abundance begs the question of why you might need ILog, Inc.'s ILog Gantt for .NET. The answer is simple: customization. All of these other sources work with Gantt charts generically; you must set them up every time you work with them. Using a custom Gantt chart application saves time, reduces user confusion, and makes creating entries much simpler. You can use ILog Gantt for .NET to create either desktop or Web-based applications that provide precisely what you need every time, without any extra work on the part of the user.

To create an application with ILog Gantt, you add any of a wealth of controls, which automatically appear in the Toolbox. Figure 1 shows the desktop application controls on the left and the Web application controls on the right. As indicated by the control set, you generally have fewer capabilities available when working with Web applications.

However, don't get the idea that the controls in the toolbox are all that you need to consider when working with this product. In many cases, you need to combine the toolbox controls with custom controls of your own. You can see a simple example of this necessity in the Time Scale sample. To obtain the continuous zoom shown in this example, the vendor implements a special class using LinearTimeLine as the base class. The LinearTimeLine class provides a correlation between the amount of time to display and the available pixels on screen. The effect is akin to an accordion, where you can see as much or little detail as required.