Microsoft Provides Free Chart Controls for .NET

Back 6 months or so ago, Microsoft released Chart Controls for .NET 3.5. They actually bought in a version of Dundas controls, hired one of the Dundas developers (Alex Gorev ) and made them available free to .NET developers. There are actually four downloads, the controls, a language pack for them, an addin to Visual Studio 2008 that adds them to the toolbox and integrates them with Intellisense and documentation. The Chart Controls offer a very powerful way to create charts with support for statistical and financial formulas, advanced chart appearance, with 3D, anti-aliasing, lighting, perspective, events, customizations and interactivity.

I've done a lot of chart generation in the past (in Delphi mainly using the excellent TeeChart components) and though the code is of course different the methodology remains the same. Create a chart, add one or more data series - then hook up the series to data sources. That can mean pulling data from a database or explicitly adding the points in code. The best way to get started is to download the various parts and then the Samples Environment which contains 200 examples for both Winforms and ASP.NET.

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