Dundas Gauge for .NET is a sophisticated and flexible component and has several features that make the developer’s task less painful. The feature I liked the most was the facility to save and load templates, which can save a lot of time, especially when a standard look and feel is required across various controls in an application or even across applications.

Also, using real-time streaming to update the controls in a web application without posting back or refreshing the page, and the ability to “play back” the variations in a value, are also quite useful. The latter is especially useful in troubleshooting.

And last but certainly not the least is the product support. I had occasion to use product support only a couple of times (which probably reflects well on the quality of the product), but on each occasion I received professional, courteous, and helpful service.

However, there are areas that can do with some improvement.

The first one is integrating help into the Gauge Wizard. One would expect a new user to use the Wizard to do most of the configuration, and integrating context-sensitive help or even one line descriptions to various fields (especially the ones that are unique to this control, like History Depth and Snapping) would be very helpful. In fact, I found myself using the property pages instead of the wizard, since they displayed a one line description of each property.

Secondly, the save and load templates feature, which is a great time saver even in its present form, would be even more useful if it could be made applicable to individual gauges in a container, rather than to the entire container as it is now.

Also, it would be good idea for Dundas to host a forum for their components, where users can interact with the support staff and each other. This would be an excellent resource for both new and advanced users, and a great way to keep in touch with the actual users and their requirements.