Do you know of a free .Net component for visual flow model graph design and editing?

An app (C#开发者_如何学JAVA4, WinForms, Entity Framework, SQL Server 2008) of mine maintains a graph of interconnected objects, each having some simple member fields and a set of many directed (in and out) one-to-one links to other objects.

I'd like to offer a user an ability to view and edit this graph visually some way, creating and removing connections, modifying objects attributes values and introducing/dropping objects.

I suppose there has to be a framework (at list a primitive kind of) for this as visual model design tools are pretty common to meet. Do you know one?

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A few years ago I collaborated with a project that used this kind of tool to build parsing software for education. The tool that was used was Graphviz, in special dot and dotty. If you don't know what is it, then this is a short description about it:

Graphviz is open source graph visualization software. It has several main graph layout programs.

The Graphviz layout programs take descriptions of graphs in a simple text language, and make diagrams in several useful formats such as images and SVG for web pages, Postscript for inclusion in PDF or other documents; or display in an interactive graph browser. (Graphviz also supports GXL, an XML dialect.)

Graphviz has many useful features for concrete diagrams, such as options for colors, fonts, tabular node layouts, line styles, hyperlinks, and custom shapes.

This is an example of the kind of graphs that were built:

_{(source: ucse.edu.ar)}

You should note that this is not a native .NET tool, but of course, you can use it anyway.

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This answer might come a little late, but Microsoft has its own .Net library called Microsoft Automated Graph Layout (MSAGL) which looks (at least visually) suspiciously similar to GraphViz, or, DOT in particular. Its name has changed over time as it has been developed in MS Labs/MS Research.

According to the product page, it contains three modules:

1. Graphing module Microsoft.MSAGL.dll,
2. Drawing module Microsoft.MSAGL.Drawing.dll, and
3. Viewer control Microsoft.MSAGL.GraphViewerGDIGraph.dll that seems to be a Windows Forms custom control.

This software used to be free a long time ago, but, unfortunately, it has made it into a paid product.