Grid View to show sequence alignment

[Bills]

Hi. I am in search of an ideal visualization tool to display alignment of two strings (say, 500 characters long) that would enable one to see the mismatches highlighted and would also allow one to search for a substring within the aligned strings. Can anyone advice me as to which tool to use that is flexible enough to permit the above- mentioned operations. I am working with VS2005. I felt that GridView tool would barely satisfy the current requirements.

Awaiting a response..

[Curtis Rutland]

Is this for web or forms?

It sounds like you may have to create this tool yourself, as those are pretty specific requirements.

[mldisibio]

Sounds like you want the functionality of a "diff" tool, an application which compares two files and highlights their differences. A file can be just one string.

Perhaps you can use an existing diff tool, or at least build off existing open source code so you don't have to re-invent the wheel.

There exist "add-ins" for VS2005 which do this, and add-ins are simple programs written in .NET, so if you find the source code for one of those, your job should be pretty easy.

For example, here is such a tool, but already compiled. Enhancements for VS2005
but if you do a search on CodePlex
I think you can also find the associated source code.

[Bills]

Thanks a lot for your suggestions.

We tried the Diff tool , but it doesnt really satisfy our requirements. Will anyone be able to suggest some grid tool. The primary requirement is that it should enable easy addition of a string of n characters into n separate cells by just using some column delimiter or by specifying the number of columns you want to split the string sequence into so that we can avoid running through thousands of for loops.

We know that it is possible using VSFlexGrid in VB. But we are looking for a similar tool for asp.net (C#).
Quick response in this regard will help us a lot!