Twirl

Twirl is a partitioning and visualization library for Silverlight which offers the following opportunities:

• visualization of large datasets stored on SQL Server
• exploration of local drives through the out-of-browser or COM capability of Silverlight
• traversals of datasets which share a common set of properties
• interactive shopping carts and filtering of items
• cataloguing of ebooks or e-documents in general. Here we are looking into the integration with Windows indexing service and alike
• customization of the partitioning and the display
• integration with other visualization techniques (diagramming, charting and whatnot)

Much like Microsoft’s PowerPivot or LivePivot is aims at seeing information through data but Twirl can

• Use WCF as a backend to serve collections and to handle large amounts of data (not limited by the client’s memory). One of our customer talks about terrabytes of records, how would one handle this in Live Pivot?
• Use standard POCO entities as data buckets.
• Use any XAML in the UI instead of only pictures. Let’s imagine you want buttons, tooltips, …in the display rather than just Morton-related images?
• Adapt the partitioning and visualization in function of customer needs.
• Have an iterative filtering of data outside the memory boundary. That is, use the whole SQL database backend as a datapool rather than just the entities in memory.
• Make use of all the fluid animation features of Silverlight
• Possibly combine diagramming and Pivot-ish visualization together.

See also the original blog when Twirl was released for some background and the motivation behind the development of Twirl.