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The Silverlight Toolkit


Chart Control

Charting is an important part of many applications. In the past developers have relied upon custom code, reporting solutions or third-party controls when they needed to embed different types of charts in applications. The Silverlight Toolkit includes a Chartcontrol that can be used to display different types of data. It's located in the Microsoft.Windows.Controls.DataVisualization assembly and Microsoft.Windows.Controls.DataVisualization.Charting namespace. By using it you can display line charts, pie charts, scatter charts, plus more. Here's an example of defining a bar chart that binds to an ObjectCollection filled with PugetSound objects:


<charting:Chart Title="Typical Use">
    <charting:Chart.Series>
        <charting:ColumnSeries
            Title="Population"
            ItemsSource="{Binding PugetSound, Source={StaticResource City}}"
            IndependentValueBinding="{Binding Name}"
            DependentValueBinding="{Binding Population}"/>
    </charting:Chart.Series>
</charting:Chart>

The code that fills the ObjectCollection that is bound to the chart is shown next:


ObjectCollection pugetSound = new ObjectCollection();
                pugetSound.Add(new City { Name = "Bellevue", Population = 112344 });
                pugetSound.Add(new City { Name = "Issaquah", Population = 11212 });
                pugetSound.Add(new City { Name = "Redmond", Population = 46391 });
                pugetSound.Add(new City { Name = "Seattle", Population = 592800 });

The output generated by the chart is shown here:

An example of defining a pie chart that binds to the same data is shown next:


<charting:Chart Title="Typical Use">
    <charting:Chart.Series>
        <charting:PieSeries
            ItemsSource="{Binding PugetSound, Source={StaticResource City}}"
            IndependentValueBinding="{Binding Name}"
            DependentValueBinding="{Binding Population}"/>
    </charting:Chart.Series>
</charting:Chart>

Summary

The Silverlight Toolkit provides a lot of great controls that can be used in Silverlight 2 applications. In this article I highlighted a few of the new controls and showed how they can be used but there's much more that can be done. Check back as I'll be diving deeper into the controls in the near future.


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