Syncfusion Inc. Corporate headquarters 1157, Executive Circle Suite C Cary, NC 27511 Phone: (919) 460 6404 Fax: (801) 640 9181 Email: info@syncfusion.com Technical Support Direct-Trac Support System: http://www.syncfusion.com/support Forums: http://www.syncfusion.com/forums Email: support@syncfusion.com Sales Phone: (919) 460 6404 Toll Free: (888) 9DOTNET Fax: (801) 640 9181 (US & rest of the world except Europe) Fax: +49(69)791249766 (Europe) Email: sales@syncfusion.com - 1 - Executive summary Microsoft's .NET platform has several extremely compelling features. As with any expansive environment, there are some issues that are a cause for concern. One major issue is the issue of reverse engineering of code compiled for the .NET runtime. Reverse engineering of such code is much easier than reverse engineering native code, since compiled .NET intermediate language (IL) code is in a high level format that is easily understood by most developers. Companies which are concerned with their intellectual property should take a hard look at this issue when considering the .NET platform. Obfuscation is a technique that provides for seamless renaming of symbols in your assemblies. Obfuscation, when properly applied, can increase the protection against decompilation by several orders of magnitude, while at the same time leaving the application intact. Syncfusion Essential Obfuscate can perform powerful and completely non-intrusive obfuscation of your .NET assemblies. Essential Obfuscate provides what we refer to as "Unipac" obfuscation. Normally obfuscation is applied on private and internal symbols leaving all public symbols intact. With Syncfusion's Unipac technology, your entire project is considered to have a common obfuscation boundary, thereby allowing for the obfuscation of even public symbols that need not be accessible outside your group of assemblies. The benefits of this approach are tremendous and the results are incredibly hard to decompile or understand. Our obfuscation techniques are born out of extensive experience with the .NET framework. Wherever required, we have made provision to deal with any consequences of obfuscation. .NET developers often use reflection techniques that refer to types as fully qualified string references. Such code will be affected by obfuscation. Another obfuscation sensitive area is serialization. Essential Obfuscate takes these and other such intricate .NET platform specific issues into account Our Obfuscator ships with a state of the art integrated development environment (IDE) that closely resembles the Visual Studio.NET IDE. The IDE provides for easy access to advanced features such as incremental obfuscation and simultaneous access to obfuscated and non-obfuscated symbols. It also gives you a wealth of information that can be used to completely analyze and understand your assemblies. In fact, Essential Obfuscate's powerful assembly analysis system makes it a tool that should be available in every .NET developer's arsenal. Essential Obfuscate also provides complete access to its object model with its integrated macro system. Developers can set complex guidelines for obfuscation using macros that can be written in C# right within the Essential Obfuscate IDE. Syncfusion offers a wide range of .NET tools. We are firmly committed to our products and offer a 30 day money back guarantee. We offer a technical support system that is without peers in the third party .NET tools market. Essential Obfuscate comes with 1 year of support and updates. Try Essential Obfuscate and experience the difference. - 2 - Executive summary.................................................................................................. 2 Essential Obfuscate .................................................................................................. 4 Metadata............................................................................................................. 4 Intermediate language (IL) .................................................................................... 5 Intellectual Property risks ...................................................................................... 6 Solution .............................................................................................................. 6 Essential Obfuscate .................................................................................................. 7 Essential Obfuscate Feature List................................................................................. 8 Powerful Obfuscation ............................................................................................ 8 Unipac technology ............................................................................................. 8 Overloaded renaming........................................................................................10 Symbol specific nuances....................................................................................12 Obfuscation rules .............................................................................................13 Mapping information .........................................................................................14 Extensible obfuscation ......................................................................................14 User interface .....................................................................................................16 Project workspace ............................................................................................16 Class View.......................................................................................................18 Source View ....................................................................................................19 Output Window ................................................................................................21 Command line version ......................................................................................21 Why choose Syncfusion?..........................................................................................23 .NET experts.......................................................................................................23 A development partner.........................................................................................23 Technical Support................................................................................................23 Flexible licensing model ........................................................................................25 Excellent value....................................................................................................25 We stand behind our products ...............................................................................25 Appendix A ............................................................................................................26 Essential Suite ....................................................................................................26 Essential Tools .................................................................................................26 Essential Grid ..................................................................................................26 Essential Chart.................................................................................................26 Essential Edit ...................................................................................................26 - 3 - Essential Obfuscate Microsoft's .NET platform facilitates reuse to an extent that was hitherto very difficult if not impossible to achieve on the Windows platform. With Microsoft's earlier attempt at reuse, the Component Object Model (COM), reuse was possible but was a lot more convoluted. Mainstream languages (with the exception of Visual Basic) had no conceptual knowledge of COM types even though COM types were typically represented using native types. Inter component interaction and interaction with the COM runtime was, usually, through the use of metadata that was separately maintained in COM type libraries. COM type libraries were separately created using an interface definition language (IDL). Type libraries had to be in sync with the associated COM object's implementation. Any change to one required a change in the other. In addition, mapping between native types and IDL types was anything but natural. Metadata .NET remedies this situation. In the .NET platform, the concept of metadata is closely tied to the runtime. All .NET assemblies have an included manifest that lists the physical modules that comprise the assembly. Each module has exhaustive details on the types that are available in it. This information is not restricted to types that are public. The metadata provides complete information on private constructs as well as protected and static constructs. The .NET runtime itself provides extensive support for accessing this metadata. In fact much of the exhaustive plumbing that the .NET framework provides is built around this metadata. A basic remoting sample can be created in as little as 4-5 lines of code (in C#) thanks to the extensive metadata that is available as part of each module. The runtime has all the information that it needs to marshal your data. You can view all the metadata for an assembly by opening it in the ILDASM tool (which ships with the Microsoft .NET framework SDK) with the /ADV command line option and then selecting View / MetaInfo / Show. - 4 - Figure 1. ILDASM displaying metadata. While metadata enables several great features, there are definite downsides to the fact that such information is made ubiquitous and easily accessible. There is no built in mechanism in the CLR to disallow access to this metadata. Therefore, there are definite concerns centered on the protection of intellectual property. Metadata can be potentially used by a competitor to understand the underlying structure of any assembly. Intermediate language (IL) When managed code that targets the CLR is compiled, it is not compiled into X86 assembly code (or any other assembly code). It is instead compiled into what is commonly referred to as p-code. You can think of p-code as higher level instruction constructs that can later be quickly translated into assembly language for execution. This is a relatively dated concept that has been used by several Basic compilers, some PASCAL variants and Smalltalk among others. There are definite advantages to this approach. It produces more compact binaries that are easily downloaded and executed on remote machines. It also allows the runtime to make smart optimizations for say, multi-processor machines. But there is at least one major disadvantage. The IL can be easily accessed from the Win32 portable executable format (PE) file in which it is stored. In fact the same ILDASM tool that can read and display metadata can also read and display all the IL that is contained in any assembly. You can in fact ask ILDASM to write out all the IL into a single file and - 5 - then proceed to edit the file and then recompile it back into an assembly using another tool, ILASM that also ships with the .NET framework SDK. Figure 2. ILDASM displaying IL. Intellectual Property risks This does mean that your intellectual property is not at all safe if you distribute your binaries. This is a problem that affects both ASP.NET applications and Windows Forms applications. With Windows Forms applications any user can potentially look at the IL and understand a large segment of your code. With ASP.NET the risk is lower since the vast majority of users will never see the actual binary. But unless you host your components and never license them for third party hosting, your competitors will more than likely have access to your component binaries. IL is extremely easy to understand. Its constructs almost resemble higher level language constructs and no one who has a few years programming experience should have any difficulty in reading and understanding IL. To make matters worse there also exist decompilers that can take the IL and the rich metadata present in any .NET assembly and reverse engineer a large segment of the code that was used to create the assembly. Indeed, if you have any intellectual property that you believe is vital and valuable to your business, then this is definitely a risk that you should evaluate. Solution There are a few different approaches that industry pundits have proposed to overcome these issues. One often suggested approach is that developers use a judicious mix of native code and managed code. The idea is that the most crucial algorithms should be embedded in unmanaged code thereby making it much harder for someone to gain access to it. - 6 - Another method that is often proposed is called obfuscation. Obfuscators can mangle symbol names into formats and names that are legal in the underlying runtime but are very difficult for humans to follow. Obfuscators make use of several low level techniques to hide sections of the metadata and the IL from prying eyes. The public interface of the assembly is not altered and to the outside world the assembly looks no different. In fact, in several cases, owing to the intimate knowledge that these tools are required to have about the assembly, they can even optimize the code, remove unwanted sections etc. Moreover obfuscation is completely non-intrusive and requires no changes to your source code making obfuscation the most natural way to protect your intellectual property on the .NET platform. Essential Obfuscate Syncfusion offers a very powerful and unique obfuscator product. Cardinal features of Essential Obfuscate are explained in the following section. - 7 - Essential Obfuscate Feature List Powerful Obfuscation Essential Obfuscate provides several unique features including the powerful Unipac system for package obfuscation. Unipac technology Essential Obfuscate lets you consider several assemblies as one logical obfuscation unit using our unique "Unipac" technology. Dependencies will be automatically established among the dlls. Normally obfuscators will only obfuscate the private members of assemblies to preserve the public call interface that other assemblies may depend on. Unipac enlarges the scope of obfuscatable symbols to include public members. For example if your application depends on a private copy of assembly A, Essential Obfuscate uses its Unipac technology to treat A, the dll assembly and the executable assembly as one logical obfuscation unit. This enables public members of assembly A to be obfuscated in addition to the private members that will normally be obfuscated, greatly increasing the difficulty of any reverse engineering attempts. Shown below is a simple library exposing a single class called FooClass obfuscated without Unipac and then with Unipac. FooClass has three public methods, FooBarMethod, FooMethod and FooCoolMethod. It also exposes a single event, FooEvent. - 8 - Figure 3. Without Unipac. In the above image you can see the assembly, obfuscated without Unipac, displayed in ILDASM. You can see that all the public methods are visible. The public FooEvent is also visible. - 9 - Figure 4. Using Syncfusion Unipac. In the Unipac version you cannot see the public methods and the public event anymore since they have been obfuscated along with the client binary as one single Unipac package. Unipac greatly enhances the strength of the obfuscation as can be seen in this simple case. Overloaded renaming Essential Obfuscate will reuse the same symbol among many fields and methods that have different signatures. For example, an int field and a boolean field will both be assigned the same name. This is perfectly legal as far as the CLR is concerned but is not legal in higher level languages. This change makes following a logical thread through obfuscated code very difficult for the human mind. Decompilers can of course synthesize new symbols based on the type to get around this. But this would still mean that all of the original symbol information is never available. Such decompiled code may create variables such as int_0 instead of the descriptive name that your original code may have contained. The figure below shows both obfuscated and unobfuscated versions of the IL for the following class. - 10 - public class FooClass { int a; bool b; float f; int ab; bool bb; float ff; public FooClass() {} public void FooMethod(bool b) { this.b = false; this.a = 10; this.f = 100f; } public void FooBarMethod(bool b, int i) { this.bb = false; this.ab = 10; this.ff = 100f; } public void FooCoolMethod(bool b, float f) { this.b = false; this.a = 10; } ... } - 11 - Figure 5. Split dual view of IL. The above class has two groups of three variables. One of these is an int, the other a bool and the other a float. It also has three methods that differ in their arguments. If you look at the obfuscated view (right side of the split source view and the class view), you can see that the integer variables ´a´, the boolean variable ´b´ and the float variable ´f´ have all been renamed to ´b´. Similary ´aa´, ´bb´ and ´ff´ have all been renamed to ´a´. The methods ´FooMethod´, ´FooBarMethod´ and ´FooCoolMethod´ have been renamed to ´a´ thus overloaded in the sense that they match the names of several methods as well as variables. This sample illustrates the essence of what happens with overloaded renaming. Symbol specific nuances Essential Obfuscate detects all dependencies among symbols in your assemblies. You can rename any of the following symbol or metadata types and the changes will be transmitted to all symbols - 12 - that hold a reference to the changed symbol. Each symbol has some associated nuances that need to be taken into account for obfuscation. Assemblies: When renaming an assembly, the generated obfuscated assembly will have the new assembly name. Essential Obfuscate will update all references inside your project (.assembly extern directives and any other symbol references) to the renamed assembly. Virtual methods: Renaming of virtual methods is complex since each virtual method could have several overrides in derived classes. The base class will also have to be taken into account. Essential Obfuscate takes these issues into account and will attempt to obfuscate virtual methods. It will check to see if the method´s declaring class or interface exists within its Unipac obfuscation scope. If it does, then Essential obfuscate has full control and can rename the virtual method. It will also rename all derived methods that override this virtual method. There are times however when the virtuals are declared in system dlls or in assemblies that are installed into the Global Assembly Cache. In such cases Essential Obfuscate will not obfuscate virtual methods since changing them would mean creating a private copy of such assemblies. In general, we do not recommend this practice and hence do not do it though technically it is indeed feasible to do this. PInvoke: Names of PInvoke methods will be obfuscated. When PInvoke methods are obfuscated, the references to the actual native dll and method cannot of course be obscured. But the declaring managed code method will be renamed to be different from the PInvoke method. Custom attributes: When renaming a custom attribute, all declarations of the custom attribute will be updated to use the new name. When renaming a type that is referenced by a custom attribute, the custom attribute will be updated to reference the new type name. Serialization and reflection: Essential Obfuscate will help you locate potential problems with utilizing reflection and serialization in obfuscated code. When you call methods that accept a string such as "Syncfusion.Windows.Forms.Button" and return a MemberInfo or a Type, Essential Obfuscate will write out a warning message since this code will not work when the symbols have been obfuscated. If you use serialization then type information is written out from within your serialization code. Essential Obfuscate will issue warnings in this case too. The solution is to exclude types that are used for serialization. Essential Obfuscate offers an advanced macro enabled GUI that makes this process quite simple. Forms: When renaming forms that have a .resource entry in the manifest file, the resource file will also be automatically renamed. Other symbols: All symbols including the names of Namespaces, Enumerations, Interfaces, Classes, Fields inside Classes, Properties, Events and Method Parameters will be obfuscated. Obfuscation rules Essential Obfuscate allows intricate control over the obfuscation process. You can write rules using regular expression. If the identity of a name matches the regular expression, the symbol will not be renamed. You can also specify if any members of the type should also not be renamed. - 13 - Mapping information The process of obfuscation discards information and cannot be reversed. Once obfuscation is done there is no way that the obfuscated assembly by itself can be used to regain the information that has been lost during the obfuscation process. While, this is one of the primary benefits of obfuscation there are cases where you wish to have incremental obfuscation. For example you may be loading assemblies dynamically in your application shell. In such instances when new dynamically loaded assemblies are added you definitely want to be able to distribute the new assembly without having to re-distribute the whole application. In such cases information that is persisted in an external file can keep track of the original obfuscation mappings thereby allowing you to easily add assemblies as required. Essential Obfuscate provides support for storing the mapping information as part of the project. This feature also allows you to test your obfuscated assemblies incrementally tweaking them to fix any problems that may arise. Extensible obfuscation Essential Obfuscate supports the plugging in of add-ins written in any .NET language. You can write custom add-ins that allow/disallow obfuscation of individual symbols based on their context or based on any references they have to the obfuscator´s object model. For example, a delegate in an add-in could loop through all your types and prevent obfuscation of any enums that are referenced by a public property. This avoids potential problems when a property grid wants to display the enumeration. This example is only for illustration purposes as such issues are handled as part of the default rule set. Figure 6. Essential Obfuscate add-in delegate code. - 14 - User interface Essential Obfuscate provides a feature rich graphical environment. Its user interface closely resembles the Visual Studio.NET user interface. Complete support for docking, MDI tabs and customizable menus make the environment highly usable for the most complex of obfuscation tasks. Our graphical environment does not merely add to the usability of the obfuscator. Built into our obfuscator is a powerful object model that has intricate information on your assemblies. We present all of this information graphically allowing you to interactively manipulate it. Project workspace An entire Unipac obfuscation package can be stored as one unit in a project. The project file takes care of maintaining the discrete pieces of information that go into the obfuscation of a single unit. A project file can contain several assemblies that need to be treated as a Unipac unit for obfuscation purposes. Projects support the addition of obfuscation rules. Rules allow selective inclusion or exclusion of symbols in the obfuscation process. You can also generate obfuscated targets right from within the Essential Obfuscate integrated development environment. The results of the build are sent to the output window in much the same manner as with the Visual Studio.NET IDE. The Solution Explorer shows all assembly file names that belong to your project. - 16 - Figure 7. Solution explorer window. You can open and close projects. A most recently used files and projects list keeps a history of projects that you have worked with. - 17 - Figure 8. Essential Obfuscate IDE. Class View The Essential Obfuscate IDE has a Class View interface that contains a tree view which displays all the symbols in the assemblies that have been loaded into the IDE. - 18 - Figure 9. Class View interface. Class View lets you perform interactive and incremental obfuscation. It allows you to obfuscate names and restore original names on the fly. You can also rename individual symbols as needed. Any changes to symbol names will be immediately reflected in dependent symbols in the Class View. Class View lets you prevent obfuscation for individual symbols using a context menu. The Class View tree also shows all dependencies on a symbol. This allows you to trace any type, method and references to any symbol from within your assembly and jump directly to the pertinent IL code. You can jump directly to a definition of a symbol inside the IL source view when you double-click inside the Class View tree on a symbol. In the Class View tree custom attributes will display both fixed and named arguments. Methods will display method name and parameters. Fields and properties will display the field name and type information The Class View features a history function that lets you jump back and forth between previously visited symbols. The Class View tree can be sorted by obfuscated name or original name. Source View The Essential Obfuscate IDE includes a Source View interface that displays the IL source code that is being acted on by the obfuscator. Any changes to symbol names will immediately be reflected in the source view. - 19 - Source View offers the ability to switch between the display of original and obfuscated names. This is particularly powerful in combination with the support for dynamic splitters that the Source View offers. With dynamic splitters, you can open additional views on the same assembly. If you open a second vertical view on your assembly using the provided dynamic splitter, one pane can show the original IL code and the other pane the obfuscated IL code thereby enabling side by side comparison. This can be invaluable if you are tracking down reflection or serialization related issues. It also makes the Essential Obfuscate IDE a great tool for learning about IL. Figure 10. Source View interface. Source View also offers a context menu that lets you jump to any referenced symbols from any given line. Source View also implements a history list that lets you jump back and forth between previously visited lines. You can search inside the Source View using a user interface that is very similar to what is available inside Visual Studio.NET. Results will be displayed in a "Find Results" window just like with Visual Studio.NET. You can also navigate to any line in the Source View using the "Goto Line" interface just as with the Visual Studio.NET interface. - 20 - Figure 11. Find / Replace dialog. The Class View interface can be synchronized with the Source View interface at any time. You can therefore freely navigate using either interface and synchronize them with a single click. When synchronizing if you are on a symbol declaration or reference then this symbol or reference will be selected in the Class View. If you are inside a specific method in the Source View, this method symbol will be selected in the Class View. Output Window The Output Window displays warnings and build results. Figure 12. Output Window. It offers a clear view of the obfuscation process from within the IDE. You can easily track and fix any conflicts from the verbose output that is emitted by the obfuscation engine and displayed by the Output Window. Command line version A command line version of Essential Obfuscate is also provided. This has support for all the options that are available with the graphical version and has the advantage that it can be integrated into - 21 - your build system. You can work with the graphical version to decide on the final settings and thereafter integrate those settings into your build process using the command line version. Both versions use the exact same obfuscation code and the output produced by them for identical projects will be identical. - 22 - Why choose Syncfusion? Essential Obfuscate offers the most powerful obfuscation features available on the market today. It also comes from a company that has extensive experience with the .NET framework. .NET experts Syncfusion has several component libraries on the market. Syncfusion architects are renowned industry experts. Our obfuscation product is not the result of ivory tower analysis. It is rather the product of months of planning and engineering that was firmly grounded in the practical issues that we faced with obfuscating retail builds1 of our component product line. You can be assured that our obfuscation techniques have been tested in every conceivable scenario given the nature of our work with the .NET framework. A development partner When you buy from Syncfusion, you bring on board a committed and capable partner who stays involved through the complete development cycle that your products go through. Our commitment is not just in words. We provide unique features and services that affirm this commitment in practice. Technical Support We realize that even the best designed and documented products will have issues that necessitate the help of trained support personnel. To ensure the highest quality of support possible, we use state of the art Customer Relationship Management software (CRM) based Developer Support System called Direct-Trac. Syncfusion Direct-Trac is a support system that is uniquely tailored for developer needs. Support incidents can be created and tracked to completion 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We guarantee same business day turn around for incidents that are entered into the Direct-Trac system before 2.00 PM on any business day. For incidents created or updated after 2 PM, we guarantee a next business day turn around. 1 Our components are available with full source code. Only retail builds of our components that are meant for re-distribution are obfuscated. - 23 - Figure 13. Syncfusion Direct-Trac Developer Support System. With Direct-Trac your complete support history is always available to you at your convenience. Direct-Trac is available online at http://support.syncfusion.com. You can login with user name = 'preview@syncfusion.com' and password = 'preview' to check out what Direct-Trac has to offer. Though Direct-Trac is the preferred support system, we also offer phone support. Phone support is available between 8.30 AM and 5.30 PM Eastern Standard Time, Monday-Friday. Syncfusion also offers email support. With Syncfusion, you will never have to pay exorbitant per-incident support charges. We abhor them as much as you do. With Syncfusion, every customer gets truly enterprise level support. Our support infrastructure enables us to provide a Quality of Service that far exceeds what is offered as standard practice in the component industry today. Don't take our word for it though. Contrast our support system with what other vendors offer and put our claim to test. With Syncfusion you get: - 24 - • Truly enterprise class support. • 24 x 7 support incident tracking. • No per incident charges. • Email and phone support. • CRM system to ensure high Quality of Service. Flexible licensing model We have a simple royalty free licensing model. Essential Obfuscate is licensed to a single user. We recognize that you often work at home or on your laptop in addition to your work machine. Therefore, our license permits our products to be installed on a laptop and a home machine in addition to a work machine for your use. Several obfuscator vendors charge you for every developer on a project irrespective of whether they work with the obfuscator or not. Such requirements, we believe, are grossly unfair to customers. We do not have any such requirement. Only those users who directly use the obfuscator need to have a license. Syncfusion benefits: • No complicated, unreasonable licensing model. • No royalties. • No activation required. • Home machine and laptop installation allowed. Excellent value Our Obfuscator is priced at $995. This includes support and updates for a full year after purchase. Our current policy is that we will release two major updates for each product every year. Major updates will be shipped to you free of charge. Minor updates will be made available for download. We have a very competitively priced subscription plan. With a subscription you get both support and updates for a year. Remember that Essential Obfuscate comes with a year of support and updates. You only have to get a subscription (optional) at the end of the first year. Syncfusion benefits: • Great price. • 1 year of free support and updates. • Major updates will be shipped to you free of cost. We stand behind our products At, Syncfusion we stand behind our products 100%. We have top notch management, architects, product managers, sales people, support personnel and developers all working with you, the customer, as their focal point. You can be assured that we will go the extra mile and beyond to meet your expectations. We sincerely hope that you found this information useful. Please do not hesitate to contact us at support@syncfusion.com if you have any questions. - 25 - - 26 - Appendix A Essential Suite Essential Suite is a comprehensive Windows Forms .NET component library that enables development of the latest user interfaces using Windows Forms in the shortest amount of time. Essential Suite includes Essential Tools, Essential Grid, Essential Chart and Essential Edit. Whether you are interested in Visual Studio.NET style Docking windows or Office XP style Customizable Toolbars or a robust and powerful Grid control, you will find that Essential Suite has these and more in one easy to use and tightly integrated package. Essential Suite was designed by industry leading architects, Stefan Hoenig and George Shepherd. Stefan Hoenig is the original author of Stingray Software's Objective Grid™. George is a contributing editor to MSDN magazine. Essential Suite was implemented by a development team that has tens of years of collective experience in the component industry. Essential Tools Essential Tools features the latest Windows user interfaces in one convenient package. Includes powerful frameworks to support Visual Studio.NET style Docking complete with Auto Hide, Drag and Drop configurability and fully Customizable Visual Studio.NET style menus. Includes Visual Studio.NET style Tabbed MDI interface, XP style Tab control, XP style Task Menu control, Group bar with unique options, Calculator control, Masked edit, Auto Complete and more. Essential Tools also includes a Workbook control that provides special support for controls with shared Data Models, a powerful Scroll control and many others. Essential Grid Essential Grid is a powerful Grid control that is implemented using a unique Styles Architecture. Essential Grid works just like Microsoft Excel and allows extremely detailed customization down to the cell level. Multi-level Undo / Redo, Shared Scrollbar support, Data / View separation, Floating cells, more than 15 cell types and unmatched extensibility are features that are unique to Essential Grid. Essential Chart Essential Chart is an easily configurable, presentation quality business Chart control. A unique point based Styles Architecture, easily extendable Data Model, easily extendable rendering model, Undo / Redo support for Formatting, powerful Layout Engine that allows any component to be hosted in the chart and a unique Shared Data Model are features that distinguish our Chart. Essential Chart also features complete integration with Essential Grid. Essential Edit Essential Edit is a Syntax Highlighting Edit control that is designed to be extensible and easy to use. Essential Edit supports Multi-level Undo / Redo, rich Formatting options and easy Configuration. It comes with syntax files for commonly used languages. Essential Edit supports Visual Studio.NET style Collapsible Sections. Essential Edit does not derive from the Windows Forms Rich Edit control. It is written from the ground up to be extensible and powerful. ™ Objective Grid is a trademark of Rogue Wave Software.