Making Ease of Your Development Process in the .NET Platform

Introducing MATFOR in VB and C#
Once again, AnCAD steps to a new milestone as it launches the latest release of MATFOR in VB and C# . Facing a growing demand for graphic and numerical techniques in VB and C# environments, the development team of AnCAD converted the MATFOR package to enable visual presentation and numerical computation in the VB and C# environments. With the extended language choices, AnCAD fosters a hope to serve developers of greater diversity, particularly in finance and scientific industries .

Shortcomings of Visual Studio
Ever since the advent of the .NET framework, building an application has been more flexible since it is no longer restricted to merely one language at a time. Although a prevailing tool that dominates the development market, Visual Studio neglects a portion of users who deal with enormous data sets, and are in need of graphical and numerical capabilities. Consequently, in universities, graduate students are often used to code procedures that do not come in the package, rather than research in their domains. However, the same strategy might not be economical when applied to small businesses.

MATFOR Overcomes the Deficiencies
Introduced a year after Microsoft^® Visual Studio 2005, MATFOR in VB and C# addresses the shortcoming of Visual Basic and Visual C#, providing advanced features and simple calling methods which facilitate data simulation. It is a perfect add-in that saves researchers the time and effort of writing their own code. Additionally, through the MATFOR widget component, the simulation result can be easily displayed in the application.

MATFOR Widget
MATFORWidget is a special widget component created to make MATFOR development available under different integrated development environments. Users may embed the MATFOR widget component into Visual Studio and create a control on the Visual Studio design surface. The figure below demonstrates a programming instance in Microsoft^® Visual Studio 2005 . MATFORWidget has been placed at the bottom of the Toolbox list.

MATFOR Graphics Library
The idea of visualization is to transform computational data into a format that is more communicative and instructive. The MATFOR Graphics Library contains a set of high-level visualization functions for data visualization, animation, graphical debugging, and presentation. The example graphic components are as follow :

One can also use MATFOR to create applications with 2D linear graph and 3D surface graph.

MATFOR Numerical Library
Matrix operations are widely used in engineering and scientific problems. For the purpose of numerical computation, these problems are normally represented in the form of linear algebra using matrices. The MATFOR Numerical Library provides users with a set of linear algebra functions to solve matrix equations intuitively and efficiently. Users do not need to know details of the algorithm used. The following is an example employing MATFOR matrix left division function, mfLDiv, to solve a system of linear equation.

The System equation can be represented in matrix-vector form as Ar = b where,

In MATFOR, r can be obtained within one line of code: r = mf.LDiv(A,b)

Performance Test

The benchmark below compares the performance of matrix multiplication (with matrices size up to 2100x2100) using MATFOR functions and that implemented directly in VB. The performance gained using MATFOR is nearly 100 times.

Future Prospects
As of October, 2006, MATFOR officially supports 33 compilers, and 4 different programming languages (go to System Requirements for more details.) In the near future, MATFOR will support additional compilers, and more widget components will be added to smooth the progress of building MATFOR applications. Last but not least, the graphical and numerical libraries will continue to expand, and the performance of their functions will be enhanced.