Kanban board for WPF
with Gantt chart integration!
As we always say: being agile doesn’t mean one doesn’t need a plan for its project. And generally, thinking ahead is always good, regardless of the type of the work. Sometimes, and really often in some fields, that means going with a Gantt chart based waterfall approach. Other times, a to do list is enough. A Kanban board — especially if it can integrate with a Gantt chart — may help with any of the approaches, or it can server as an intermediary, faster step during the planning processes.
At DlhSoft we love both Gantt charts and being agile. And we find many similarly thinking people all around. Both in software development and in other disciplines. We see many people using Kanban boards, too.
So we thought: why not develop a Kanban board component that can easily integrate to Gantt charts too? Yes, we have done that a long time ago, in fact, for AngularJS. But now we’ve finally had the time and resources to complete the work for WPF as well.
What do we have here? It’s an interactive component that allows developers to present items in a table-style, grouping them in cells of collapsible “rows”, binding them into columns representing states. In fact, this is the very definition of a Kanban board — and actually we’ve took our inspiration from the user interface of Visual Studio Online.
End users can, of course, drag items around using the mouse, and edit item fields either directly inside their boxes or through their menu (that, by the way, gets available when clicking the ellipsis button appearing upon hovering the item’s area).
These being said, let’s show how the WPF component can be set up into an app. First, you need to download the DlhSoft.KanbanLibrary.wpf NuGet package into your Visual Studio solution and reference it into the appropriate project. Then you simply need to import the KanbanLibrary namespace and instantiate the KanbanBoard component as any other WPF control! And in code behind, of course, you should prepare the data items, their groups (rows), columns (states), other optionally referenced elements (item types, categories and resources), and any other settings needed to integrate well into your app. End users will be delighted to drag and drop items around and change their groups and/or states, while you can control and handle these changes through specific events.
But this isn’t all! As you probably know (or have guessed reading the title of this publication), DlhSoft also offers WPF based Gantt chart components, and our Kanban board control can be integrated with those Gantt chart instances with ease. All you need is to initialize both components’ Items collections in sync, and then handle changes on each party that isn’t set to remain read-only and update the other accordingly. For example, you can change the state of an item whenever its progress updates in the Gantt chart area, and update the progress of the item to some specific values (e.g. 0%, 50%, and 100%) whenever the state changes in the Kanban board.
Here we have a small sample application showing how you can do this using C#:
Why would you need such integration? Well, as we already stated, there are different types of plans to be done in different phases of a project, and at different granular levels. For example, a team can use a Gantt chart when you start a new project and use it until it reaches its maintenance phase, but use a Kanban board afterwards. Or a Gantt chart can be used for representing high level stories and their inner-dependencies within the project, and a Kanban board for planning the actual sprints in an agile environment. Or any combination of the above.
Regardless, thank you very much for reading this post.
If you are interested to test our component you should know that it’s free to do so for unlimited time. And we also offer free technical support — provided directly by developers! — before and after purchasing any production license. For further details, here is the page of the product on our Web site:
And this is more info about GanttChartDataGrid component from DlhSoft Gantt Chart Light Library for WPF, as well:
