Hello Northwoods.
There is a new and interessting feature for positioning and alignling in Visual Sutdio 2005 / Framework 2.0 -> Snaplines.
Is Northwoods already engaged with this?Are there any ideas and plans to implement such a feature in GoDiagramm?
Thanks for your information.
Regards.
Rulli76
That feature is already supported by GoView in the Visual Studio 2005 Form designer. Try it!
Or are you asking about such support at run-time for GoObjects as seen in a GoView? We are in the midst of implementing various tools and controls for assisting general GoDiagram drawing applications. That’s what Northwoods.Go.Draw.dll is for, although the one that currently is included with version 2.4.1 does not have any special positioning/aligning tools.
Hello Walter,
Yes, i was not talking about support in Visual Studio but about GoObjects inside a GoView.
Do you think this such a support that will exists in next versions or this will be my work?
Also there is the question, if there is a patent on this feature and if i am allowed to do this.
I guess it’s possible we’ll do some work like that, but we don’t have it planned at the moment.
Regarding patents, I have no idea if Microsoft has patented anything related to snaplines.
OK, thanks for your fast responses.
Regards.
I like this feature and would appreciate to find it in GoDiagram someday :-)
My first guess regarding patents is, that it is not protected. In Borlands Delphi 2006 there is a similar feature called ‘snap-to lines’. So it seems to be worth some research ;-)
I’ve been using such a feature in any vector drawing software I’ve been using since at least 1992. I’d be surprised is there was any patent problem, but who knows.
In a previous lifetime I used to be on the (software) patent review committee for Digital Equipment Corporation. I was often amazed at the silly things that got patented in the software area by other corporations. That included Microsoft, with whom we occasionally traded patent rights.
So although the general idea of snaplines is certainly not patentable now, I could imagine that Microsoft had patented some very specific feature that Visual Studio now exhibits. I don’t know of any, but I haven’t investigated.