This topic gives an overview of the major task-related features available using the xamGantt™ control.
This topic contains the following sections:
The following table summarizes the xamGantt control’s main task-related features. Additional details follow later in this topic.
The xamGantt control provides a feature based upon the “user-controlled scheduling” functionality introduced in Microsoft Project™ 2010.
The tasks in the xamGantt control support both automatic and manual scheduling.
Manually scheduled tasks:
are useful during the early stages of creating a project while some of the project’s details are unclear
allow entering free form text for the start, finish and duration fields
The xamGantt’s scheduling engine manages manual and auto tasks differently.
Manually scheduled tasks:
The scheduling engine calculates the start and finish dates, but does not change their corresponding start, finish and duration fields.
Automatically scheduled tasks:
The engine calculates the start and finish dates based upon the task dependencies and constraint information.
Tasks in the xamGantt control can be toggled alternately between active and inactive. The basis for this feature is the inactive tasks feature, first introduced in the Microsoft Project 2010.
Inactive tasks are ignored by the scheduling engine, thus making them useful for what-if analysis, where a task is not considered in the schedule, but preserves its information and does not delete them.
Deactivating an ancestor task, results in deactivating all of the descendant tasks
Adding an active task to an inactive task (for example, when indenting), results in the active task’s ancestors being made active because an inactive summary should not contain any active tasks.
The duration of a task is the amount of time that the task requires to be completed. It may be expressed in different units although the value represents a fixed amount of work time.
The xamGantt control supports the same unit types as Microsoft Project 2010.
The xamGantt control provides functionality for creating dependency between two project tasks.
There are four link types:
You can also specify dependency lead and lag time.
Where lead time is a value of negative duration indicating the amount of overlap between the tasks
Where lag time is a value of positive duration indicating a delay between the task’s links fields
The xamGantt control exposes the same constraint types as Microsoft Project 2010.
The supported constraints are:
Flexible constraints (they do not need a constraint date)
As Soon As Possible (the default type when scheduling a project
from its start date)
As Late As Possible (the default type when scheduling a project from its finish date)
Semi-flexible
Start No Earlier Than
Start No Later Than
Finish No Earlier Than
Finish No Later Than
Inflexible
Must Start On
Must Finish On
The xamGantt control provides task deadline setting functionality.
The deadline date describes the target date when the task should be completed. This date has an impact on the scheduling engine, but it is treated similarly to a weak constraint.
The xamGantt control provides project milestone creation functionality.
Milestones have zero duration and mark some important date or event.
The xamGantt scheduling engine calculates the critical state for the project task based on whether the task is considered to be along the critical path. That happens when the task cannot be delayed without violating a deadline, constraint or increasing the project’s duration.
By default, the xamGantt engine calculates a single critical path; however, you can customize this configuration.
You can also specify a critical slack limit to determine the required amount of slack for a task to be considered as non critical.
Some tasks are considered critical based on their constraint information. The xamGantt’s user interface calculates the task’s critical state as a read only value. Additionally, the xamGantt supports highlighting critical tasks and their values.
The xamGantt control provides functionality for specifying a task’s completed work.The task progress represents the amount of the duration that has been completed. Changes to the task progress affect the progress of the descendant tasks and vice versa - changing the progress of the descendant task updates the progress of the ancestor summary tasks.
The xamGantt scheduling engine calculates the task’s slack.
Where the slack represents the amount of time that a task may be delayed without affecting its dependent tasks.
The slack calculated information is exposed in the Start Slack, Finish Slack, Free Slack, and Total Slack grid columns.
The following topics provide additional information related to this topic.