Experiences with Atalasoft DotImage controls

I've been evaluating some imaging controls from Atalasoft for a client project. The ap­pli­ca­tion uses Windows Forms which poses some licencing issues with many imaging components out there. After some searching I ended up on the Atalasoft site and downloaded a trial. What you get in the box is impressive: hybrid managed C++/C# assemblies that don't rely on native code, excellent online help and a number of sample ap­pli­ca­tions that cover useful areas of the API. These haven't been updated to support .NET 2.0 features such as Back­ground­Work­er but this is simple, if tedious to code yourself.

Unlike vendors that have carried a product forward from the COM days, Atalasoft have im­ple­ment­ed an object model which is close to the framework guidelines. Base func­tion­al­i­ty in the toolkit is good, but DotImage Pro is where the cool WinForms bits live. They include Thumb­nail­View and FolderThumb­nail­View classes which can load from custom objects or watch the filesystem re­spec­tive­ly. I'd imagine most people just need to load thumbnails from disk, but my ap­pli­ca­tion needs to load images from a range of sources.

I used the PDF Rasterizer extension to extract thumbnails from an Acrobat document and was pleasantly surprised by the results. Memory con­sump­tion was low and didn't increase massively even with large numbers of thumbnails. You can find out more about the memory management on the Atalasoft site. As I use more features of the toolkit I'll probably post some snippets online.

Tagged with net, atalasoft and imaging.