Visual Studio® 2010 and .NET 4, Six-in-one

Chapter 14. .NET Charting Components

In Chapter 8, you learned why the overall user experience is important for your applications. If the users of your software can handle it intuitively and easily, they will have a positive experience. If the application is tedious and laborious to work with, or it does not give the expected feedback, users won't use it — or, at least, they won't be happy.

For applications that work with numbers (or with a large set of numbers), the experience users perceive is more important. Charts are great tools for improving this experience. Displaying charts for a certain set of numbers offers a nicer experience than a simple table of data, and, in one look, charts will convey the same information than can be represented in a complex table.

For a long time, no chart controls were shipped with Visual Studio. If you wanted to use them, you had to buy one from a user interface (UI) component vendor, or download an Open Source component with the appropriate license. Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 change all this. Two kinds of sophisticated chart controls are the part of the framework — one for Windows Forms applications, and one for ASP.NET Web applications.

The two chart controls share the same concepts, and they differ only in technology-dependent features. This chapter focuses on using the Windows Forms chart control, and Chapter 16 examines the ASP.NET charting improvements.

In this chapter, you will learn the following things about charts:

• Creating charts — You ...