The name ‘orbifold’ refers to a mathematical object but this site is not in any way particularly focused on this subject although the author is well aware of the significance in mathematics and physics of manifolds, orbifolds and conifolds.
The Orbifold is a follow-up of ‘The Netron Project‘ which (between 2000 and 2005) boosted the Netron library and many smaller projects (some of which are still avaialble on this site). Around 2005 the Netron development stopped in favor of a new WPF line of products, which was an obvious shift and as a graphical platform much better suited to diagramming and data visualization in general.
The Netron source code was first hosted on SourceForge and later hosted privately. In the period 2005-2006 the code was download around 300.000 times and was a huge success. In comparison, Unfold was a first step towards WPF diagramming and has had a minor 6000 download since its inception. Partially because WPF has been rather adopted slowly by the market, partially because Netron contained a lot of layout algorithms in C# which at that time were not available elsewhere (though well known in Java and C++).
In 2006 ‘The Orbifold’ was founded it order to put aside the Netron brand and association, as well as the open source model related to it. Meanwhile Netron got however a second life through Netron Reloaded and a continuation of the codebase on a private SVN branch. In 2009 The Orbifold became a company with limited liability under the Belgian regulations and is hence officially ‘The Orbifold b.v.b.a.‘. The shares are 100% owned by Francois Vanderseypen.
As far as .Net diagramming is concerned a lot changed since the year 2000, not the least the way the graphics pipeline got revolutionized through WPF and Silverlight. Data visualization has become more prominently present in applications, Microsoft servers and in Visual Studio. Still, the basic principles are very much the same and the patterns underneath diagramming are to some extend technology independent. It was nonetheless necessary to re-write the whole Netron library from scratch and this happened between 2007 and 2008, which culminated in the GraphSquare product. GraphSquare (abbreviated as G2) was designed from the start for WPF and boasts a much deeper architecture than Netron, both in terms of organization, usage of patterns, usage of modern ideas like dependency injection and Unity, usage of styling/theming.
Part of the fascination of graphs resides in the beauty to visualize a certain quality of data which would otherwise be more difficult to perceive. This is most apparent in mindmapping where concepts are spread out and in large graphs wherein certain clusters or blobs can be detected. For this reason G2 allows both of these with ease, contrary to Netron where more efforts were necessary to achieve either one.
The diagramming paradigm has infiltrated more and more the software development process (IDE designers inside VS2010, server tools like SQL Server) and plays a vital role in visualizing social networks, information research in general and in fundamental research (see e.g. ‘the physics of networks‘). It’s also in this respect that this site tries to serve as a platform for information about everything related to diagramming, graphs and networks.
In 2009-2010 a technology partnership was forged with Telerik which delivers the best .Net components on the market. Through a joint effort to deliver innovative and high-quality software for WPF and Silverlight, this partnership also enables both parties to give customers a complete suite of .Net components and superior consultancy through true expertise and proven practice.
Over the years many added their mark to The Netron Project and The Orbifold through their support; Mark Johnson, Howard van Rooien, Denis Vuyka, Lutz Roeder, Jaret Pfluger, Paul Harrington, Gevik Babakhani, Tom Mertens, Fabian Luque, Christophe Daniel Rüegg, Jake Yacizi, Guillaume Bertrand, Chen Feng and many others who supported this adventure in various ways. Thanks as well to students from around the world, Microsoft developers (NetMap, GLEE & Belgian MVP’s), friends and co-workers, the diagramming competition who looked at the code and gave their feedback. Last but not least, Geri and Merel who keep me alive through it all.
A tremendous amount of gratitude goes to Vassil Terziev (Telerik CEO) for being a great human being, an amazing leader and for giving The Orbifold the opportunity to be part of an amazing adventure.
