I'm gonna adda bit

http://www.developa.com/popgrowthtimed.htm was in the BetaResource kit - I simply changed it to a control.

Note also that you'll have to change them to context menu's for a control
http://www.developa.com/graphicsexplorer.htm

also note that exactly the same code is used in the below link (though here they are seperate assemblies) .... indeed you can embedd an .exe in the web  page ( I didn't realise that at the time)
Turn off download managers to try the following
http://www.developa.com/bin2/graphicsexplorer.exe

As you can see -if you get the hang of the gdi you can do some good stuff - perhaps the popgrowthtimed could be altered to display  a time dependant running set of points pulled from your database  ?

The latter one here actually paints a bitmap to the gdi .... it could be created using data from a database - creating a chart.

You could also not actually display the results immediately, just make a button saying "view results" and when clicked a windows form opens up displaying  them all.

I don't know if you ever seen a java  applet that, on the click of a button, releases itself from its container page  - I'm gonna have a go at doing that one day soon.

But remember - if your going to access a SQLServer then really you cannot get away from the connection string problem. I would write a web service into it to retrieve the data before displaying, and up date on the click of a button.
The above are different because they generate their own points from inside the code.

Ummm ... what else ??? Ummm.... Oh, you can do stuff like access client side word to display a document ... but anything that is accesses client side breaks security and you have to get permissions ( beit from a downloaded msi file or simply manually set in using mscorcfg.msc ) but that's no good for the public really.

Also note that if you plan what you are doing you can reuse all of the components and make a client side app to boot.

Hope it helps.

I luv them, too. Am trying to learn more gdi so I can do more with them (I used to love all those spinning/twisting flashy applets)

With these things though, if you request another page with the same control on it it still has to download that control again ( I believe) - with java applets, because they are in the browser cache, they are picked up from there. Appets were cool cos you could use them as a data/image store - download a full one to the cache and retrieve everything from there ( that was my plan - I never did get round to actually doing that one). With these things you can't ( I don't think).

Tell me if you find out.

I still have some old Maths stuff I want to do using this stuff - i.e. the old 3d point viewer with textures when I can get round to it (soon)

Hope it's enlightening and sustains you through some hard work you now have to do.

Email me if you want any of the code above, I'm sure its here somewhere (40GB is hard to keep track of)