What controls/tools are you using in your medical software for capturing and manipulating images? Also you probably mentioned it in class and I didn't pick up on it, but do you store your document images as a file or within a SQL data base?

-Larry

As Keith mentioned we use Atalasoft...their most recent version resolves a lot of issues that they had in the past regarding memory leaks and performance issues.  For the most part they have been pretty good to work with and I would recommend them again.  At the moment I am awaiting a resolution regarding their licensing.  I am the only developer that uses the tool within our team and we have a class library that houses all of the logic...but they have changed how their license checking works and any assembly that even references the class library must be compiled on a machine that has a license....which obviously is causing me a lot of heartburn.  So that would be my only caution to you at the moment.  Otherwise their product is working well now and it is runtime royalty free which none of their competitors are....so that alone is a big selling point!

Trent, can you explain this to me? I looked at their web site and they are talking "Server License". What server are they talking about?

If I develop an app using your ES to get data/images from/to my client app. does your ES consider as their "License server"?



I'd be interested to include basic adding/viewing images to my client app. Will I need their SDK or does .Net have enough tools to do that?

Thanks!

..ßen

For your first question, we allow the users to store the images as files on the disk or as binary data within the database.  Some of our clients use only SQL Express, and with the 4GB DB limit, we still need to allow them to store the files on disk.  However, with the full version of SQL, they can store them in binary fields in the DB.

For your second question... If you're just showing JPEGs or BMPs, then you don't need Atalasoft... TIFFs even for that matter.  You will need Atalasoft if you need to add scanning support to your application, to allow your users to scan directly from your application.  Once you have the data as an image file, you don't have to have Atalasoft to display the images... a .NET PictureBox set to the right dimensions will work just fine. 

We also use Atalasoft for PDF rendering, so, when users scan documnets into the app, they are stored as PDFs and rendered through an Atalasoft control.

Thanks Ben!

..ßen

One thing I might add on the TIFFs are multi-page TIFs.  If you are going to support multi-page TIFs then you may want to look at using a 3rd party tool like Atalasoft.  When you load up a TIF into an Image in .NET it will assume the first page if there is more than one page stored within the TIF.