A few months back, Lee Sherry, Senior BI Manager at Microsoft Business Intelligence, contacted our sales director, Charles, about having an app created for the company. Charles understood right away what her needs were and proposed the project to Pierre-Luc (“PL” for short!), Lead Developer for Xceed DataGrid for WPF. Everyone involved with the project knew that the star of the app, our WPF datagrid, would make it easy to deliver the goods in short time!
What Lee wanted was a rich, cutting-edge XAML Browser Application that would let the company’s managers navigate easily through numerous selected reports, filtering, sorting, and grouping their data. But the application had to remain responsive at all times, and Lee wanted an all-purpose solution, one that avoided hard-coded, pre-defined views, which would have limited the flexibility of the application. She also emphasized that it had to work with their existing data structure.
Xceed’s developers met this challenge head on and devised a solution that was a stream-lined XBAP that interfaced with a SQL data source, which ran in Partial Trust. By doing things this way, the less technically savvy users of the software didn’t need to install certificates on their machines. However, this architecture meant using a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Web service, which acted as an intermediary between the XBAP and the SQL server. A data paging system was also implemented to fetch the data through the Web service. Of course, our designer team played a big part in the process, creating a gorgeous and compelling user experience!
The application was developed entirely by Xceed, and met Lee’s expectations fully, helping Microsoft reach its objectives and saving the company time and money. After receiving the app, Lee e-mailed the following to Charles: “The Xceed WPF grids allowed us to deliver some fantastic interactive tools to our executives and increase the impact of our information. We are extremely satisfied with the professional support by the entire Xceed team. The Xceed technology is visually striking and works beautifully with our Silverlight and WPF infrastructure.”
