Visual Intelligence: Microsoft Tools and Techniques for Visualizing Data

Chapter 9

Custom Code

Most of the visualizations used in this book are based upon the standard Microsoft toolset, but for some types of visualization, those tools just don’t have enough capabilities. Missing visualizations include column charts that are both clustered and stacked (allowing for another dimension of data), color wheels, as covered in Chapter 14, heatmaps (although you can build them in Excel by using cells), network graphs of various types, and tree graphs (although the Decomposition Tree is available in PerformancePoint).

When a tool doesn’t have the visualization you need, it’s time to write your own in a language such as C#. There are various ways of using code to create a visualization, and this chapter explains the different methods.

Audience

This chapter sets the groundwork for the HTML5 examples covered in Chapters 11, 12, and 15: each chapter contains only one HTML5 example. While this chapter and the examples can theoretically be done by someone with no HTML5, Javascript, or C# background, experience in some form of coding (such as VBA) will be advantageous. The rest of the book can be read without this chapter.

Silverlight, WPF, XAML, and HTML5

Prior to the release of Windows 8, and indeed prior to the broad success of the non-Microsoft computer in the form of the iPad and the Android tablet, the toolset choice for visually rich applications was simple: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on the desktop and Silverlight (a web-based subset of WPF) ...