Visual Scheduling Blog

Whether an operation needs a rest time after processing and how long this will be is an important information for the production planner and hence should be visualized in his planning table. In the daily life of manufacturing companies you can find a lot of examples for operations with rest times: After varnishing, a table top has to dry for 24 hours before it can be further worked on. In theory, visualizing rest times in the planning board is very easy: you have to create a node with two layers – the first one visualizing the operation, the second one the rest time. One of our VARCHART XGantt customers recently asked how he could visualize rest times that can also be outside working hours, if, e.g., the drying phase of the paint falls on a weekend. For this, you have to take into account the “Duration field” setting in the Edit Layer dialog for the “Wait Time” in VARCHART XGantt. Click here to learn more:

VARCHART XGantt is a powerful Gantt control (.NET and ActiveX edition) enabling you to create intelligent Gantt charts with little effort. Recently, one of our customers contacted us having a quite complex problem which our support could help to solve. As I’m sure that other developers working with VARCHART XGantt will also be interested in the approach we came up with I decided to give you a brief outline of the problem and its solution .

The approach involves interactively swapping tasks via the table and, as a consequence, adjusting the order in which they have to be processed.

First of all, I have to clarify that this blog post is not(!) about progress bars as we all know well from installing software or from downloading files. But this post is about the visualization of progress as we are used to see for instance in production planning or project management software systems.

I want to demonstrate the difference between a "classic" progress bar and a forecast oriented visualizaton of progress. The second is a new approach that has been currently implemented in our latest Gantt chart application we developed with our NETRONIC Web Application Framework and the feedback from the users was enthusiastic.

Most people are used to a comfortable sorting option, like, e.g. in the Windows Explorer: Clicking the table header of a column will sort the files in in ascending or descending order, this being indicated by an arrowhead pointing upwards or downwards shown in the table header.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could use this functionality also in XGantt? In my blog post I'm going to show you how this is done in three easy steps and with little programming effort.

Two weeks ago, I started my series of blogs about the new version (5.1) of VARCHART XGantt by describing the new graphical features of our Gantt chart control. The release notes of this new version can be found here.

Here comes #2 of my series, where I'd like to give you some insights about what we've come up with concerning the snap tools making positioning objects easier.

A new version (5.1) of VARCHART XGantt, our Gantt control for creating powerful Gantt charts, has been released recently. You can find the complete release notes here. 

We’ve come up with so much new features that introducing them all at once would go beyond the scope of one blog post. So I decided to split my description of what's new in the Gantt chart control into a series of blog posts, the first dealing with some great new graphical features.

This blog post addresses software developers building visual scheduling applications or considering to develop a graphical planning board with our .NET Gantt chart control VARCHART XGantt. It shows how you can use the recently introduced "InInteraction Events" functionality to customize the display of the duration in the tooltip (InfoWindow) during the drag & drop interaction. This post does not only give a step-by-step explanation of how to achieve this, but also provides the required code. 

Interactive Gantt charts are a proven and powerful tool to help organizations deal with time-related and resource-oriented planning and scheduling data. Being interactive, they enable users to quickly react to short-term incidents and thus to gain operational agility. From having worked with hundreds to thousands of Gantt chart users in the past decades, we learned that Gantt chart interactions do not only mean shifting an operation by drag & drop. It is meant in a sense that the Gantt diagram provides context-sensitive decision support information during the drag & drop interactions. In this blog post we will further outline the idea of intelligent Gantt chart interactions and will provide .NET Gantt chart developers with tips how to achieve this.