Does the sample project meet most of your charting needs? What ideas do you have about a good charting API? Have you used any third-party libraries or controls? If so, which ones? Let us know on the .NET technical discussion forum.
Build a Reusable Graphical Charting Engine with C#
The .NET framework contains everything you need to build this customizable line-graphing application that supports multiple overlaid data sets, each with its own color and line style. Unless you need extremely sophisticated charts, just draw your own.
by Alex Hildyard
February 6, 2004
t's not every day you need to need to draw a chart, but it happens just often enough for you to wish there were some standard System.Drawing object to help you. By "chart" I mean nothing more sophisticated than a graphical rendering of a set of points with a scale and a pair of labelled axes.
I have written chart-like objects to fulfill particular needs before, but had never ended up reusing them, primarily because either the drawing logic was too specialized to be of general use, or because the data source it visualized was too specialized to describe other, more generic kinds of data. My dilemma, therefore, had a fairly obvious solution: Develop a Chart class that decouples its drawing logic from the data it visualizes; use as simple a data format as possible, and expose useful properties, so other classes can perform custom rendering if required.
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t's not every day you need to need to draw a chart, but it happens just often enough for you to wish there were some standard System.Drawing object to help you. By "chart" I mean nothing more sophisticated than a graphical rendering of a set of points with a scale and a pair of labelled axes.
