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

Chapter 16. ASP.NET Charting Controls

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 Open Source charting components with the appropriate license. With Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0, Microsoft ships two Chart controls — one for Windows Forms applications, and another one for ASP.NET applications. In Chapter 14, you learned about the features of the Windows Forms Chart control.

Although ASP.NET and Windows Forms are very different in their UI principles, the two Chart controls share the same concepts. After you have learned one of them, you can start using the other one in a few minutes.

With Visual Studio 2010, you can drag a Chart control directly from the Toolbox to your design surface. You can easily set up both Chart controls through the dozens of properties they exploit. Charts have great design-time support. When you change a property, the design-time view changes accordingly.

You can choose from more than 30 chart types and customize them through general and chart type-specific properties. The Chart control supports data binding and many manipulations, including filtering, sorting values, and applying financial formulas.

Most concepts of the Windows Forms Chart control treated in Chapter 14 are the same for the ASP.NET Chart control, including the chart elements and their structure, most property and method names, chart types, three-dimensional ...