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 at 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 area, 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, an 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:

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

More Features

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

• 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 at the documentation, check over 200 examples included on the samples or visit the Chart Forum.

History

• 1^st December, 2008: Initial post