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Doing any kind of graph charting or data visualization in managed code has always required either expensive 3rd-party software (e.g. Dundas, etc) or feature-incomplete open source projects (ZedGraph and NPlot come to mind). Furthermore, doing COM interop with Excel charts can be a nightmare.

Many times I just want to plot a bunch of data, probably an X-Y plot, to see a trend in some blob of numbers I have laying around.  Being an engineer, most of the time I’ll reach for MATLAB, but lately I’ve been doing quite a bit of XML processing that (to say it nicely) is not at all well-suited for MATLAB. I wanted to stay on the .NET Framework, take advantage of the .NET libraries I’ve written to parse the files (Linq to XML anyone?) and plot the data.  I’ve used ZedGraph in the past as a managed charting library, but it can be quirky.

I just discovered yesterday that Microsoft has released Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.  Whoa, really? Could this be a better solution to ZedGraph? They even have samples available for download. I decided to try it out.

I ran the installer (MSChart.exe) and found that the assemblies get installed to “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Chart Controls\Assemblies”. There are 4 dlls, 2 for WinForms and 2 for ASP.NET:

• System.Web.DataVisualization.Design.dll
• System.Web.DataVisualization.dll
• System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization.Design.dll
• System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization.dll

After installing the controls, I unzipped the samples and opened up WinFormsChartSamples.exe:

Wow, that doesn’t look familiar at all.   I could swear I’ve seen controls like that before….oh yeah, Dundas!  After a bit of poking around, it appears that Microsoft (specifically the SQL Server 2008 team) has acquired the data visualization bits from Dundas.  Cool. I’m glad that Microsoft released the stand-alone assemblies for charting so that I don’t have to install SQL Server 2008 just to get 2MB of DLLs

The charting controls are extremely customizable. Take a look at some of the samples:

Very cool.  I’ll probably give them a test drive here soon.

Hope that helps!

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