New Microsoft Chart Controls for Web and Windows Forms Applications

Introduction

Microsoft has just launched a very rich chart control for .NET web and windows forms applications. Let’s take a look in some features from it.

Prerequisites

• Visual Studio 2008 SP1, click here to download the Service Pack!
• .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, click here to download!
• Microsoft Chart Controls, click here to download!
• Visual Studio 2008 Support Tool for the Chart Control, click here to download!
• Documentation, click here to download!
• Web and windows application samples, click here to download!

Chart Types

The following chart types are available:

• Bar and columns;
• Line;
• Area;
• Pie and Doughnut;
• Point;
• Range;
• Circular;
• Accumulation;
• Data Distribution;
• Financial;

You still have the option to combine more than one chart type.

Bind Types

The following options are available to be used as bind types for your application charts:

• XML Files;
• Excel Files;
• CSV Files;
• Arrays;
• IEnumerable objects;
• Dataviews.

How to...

The examples and documentation are really good and to work with the new Microsoft Chart control is very straightforward. Drag and drop a chart control, set properties in design and / or runtime and it’s done!

Namespace

The namespace you are going to use is System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting.

Main properties

• ChartAreas: It is the area where a chart is plotted. Your chart may contain more than one chart areas that means you may plot more than one chart by render and you may even overlap charts;
• Series: It is the data you may plot on your chart area;
• ChartType: The chart type property is under the Series property and defines how your data series will be displayed on a chart area;
• Axes: Defines properties for the X and Y axes like appearance and titles;
• Palette: Defines the colors set for your chart;
• Titles: Defines text that may be used to describe a chart, a axis or any other part of the chart;
• Legends: Defines the legends that will display the data series information;
• Labels: Defines text that may be displayed close to axis, points and custom labels.

Examples

The following code uses two arrays to create a simple pie chart:

double[] yValues = { 10, 27.5, 7, 12, 45.5};
string[] xNames = { “Mike”, “John”, “William”, “George”, “Alex” };
myChart.Series[0].Points.DataBindXY(xNames, yValues);

Output:

Picture 1: Pie chart created with array databind.

Using the same code but changing some values will produce the following bar chart:

Picture 2: Column chart created with an array databind.

More Features

This new control set is really rich on the level of customization allowed. Some other features of the new Microsoft Chart control includes:

• Image plot or binary streaming rendering;
• Allows a very complex set of data to be plotted;
• 3D visualization control (perspective, angle, rotation);
• Events to give even more control over how to plot data, custom images, post plot actions and a click event;
• May be used in conjunction with Ajax to create real time charts, use charts as trigger to load data;
• Drill down chart with preview;
• Image map selection;
• Custom animated tooltips;
• Capture of mouse events.

If you want to get more information, take a look in the documentation, check over 200 examples included on the samples or visit the Chart Forum.