Charts

Introduction

In this article my aim is to give a quick overview of the controls included in the Silverlight Toolkit - launched a week ago and to give an example for every control included in the toolkit. I've made a little research for each control and I will share my impressions with the community.

Overview

The following Silverlight controls are included in the toolkit:

Components in the Stable Quality Band:

• TreeView
• DockPanel
• WrapPanel
• Label
• HeaderedContentControl
• HeaderedItemsControl

Components in the Preview Quality Band

• AutoCompleteBox
• NumericUpDown
• Viewbox
• Expander
• ImplicitStyleManager
• Charting

TreeView

Let's start with the TreeView.

While digging into templating and styling of Silverlight 2 Beta 2 controls, I came into a situation where the event for MouseLeftButtonDown was not triggered when I click on the control. I created a sample project and in the Page.xaml I added the following:

<StackPanel Orientation="Vertical" 
MouseLeftButtonDown="StackPanel_MouseLeftButtonDown">
     <TextBlock Text="Antonio Moreno" Height="22" FontSize="16" />
          <Grid>
               <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
                    <ColumnDefinition />
                    <ColumnDefinition />
               </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
                    
               <TextBlock Text="AMoreno@hotmail.com" Grid.Column="0"/>
               <TextBlock Text="(5) 555-3932" Grid.Column="1"/>
          </Grid>
</StackPanel>

 As you can see from the xaml, I have a StackPanel and an event handler for MouseLeftButtonDown event.

Overview

Data represented visually is often easier to read. In this article we present a bar chart control, which presents content of a table. In the same way as in one of our previous examples the control loads its data from an Excel XML Spreadsheet. It looks traditional but there are just a few minor improvements added.

Download soruce code(Silverlight control library, sample application) C#, VS2008 RTM
View Live Demo

In General

There are three steps to create the control:

• Load the data from a .XAML

• Initialize the needed components

• Set their properties so that they arrange according to the size of the control.
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I've seen this request many times:

How do I make a Chart in Silverlight?

I'm going to show you that with some simple math and a little bit Silverlight knowledge, you too, can enjoy the clarity of a chart on your web page. 

Technically, the goal is to build a simple reusable horizontal bar chart using Silverlight 1.0 and dynamic data.  The code will be written in XAML and JavaScript and I will be using Visual Studio 2008 as my editor.  How you get the data to the app is up to you, but to keep this simple, I will be using local JSON formatted data.

Overview

A while ago SoftwareFX released cool Silvelverlight charts which show just how powerful Silverlight can be. Now they are sharing their experience and future plans with us.

Overview