Microsoft has not provided any Wizard to customize the data chart by giving the data source, customizing the size, look and color of the data, all these things need to be handled by the developer to bind and use the required data format as such. Also we will see some good examples on using this control in Web application and a windows application to see how flexible the control is used. In this article we will see on using the Chart control in both Visual Studio 2008 and Visual studio 2010 versions starting from the beginner to the experts. The controls API provides option to make the sorting filter, grouping, searching, merging, splitting and exporting to the required format making the control more robust for the developers to use it across the requirement. Also the control provides most of the features required to make the chart more attractive like providing lines, labels, trend lines etc. Microsoft has a count of around 35 distinct chart type in the latest version of the visual studio. Some of the types of charts available with the control are as follows: PIE Chart, LINE Chart, BAR Chart, BUBBLE Chart, PYRAMID Chart etc. This control can be used in both windows and web application to show the rich user data in a good graphical format.Ĭhart control offers wide variety to choose the best format required by the end users to view the data. In Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft added the control in-build which provides developers much easier to use the control. Chart control introduced by late September 2009 as a separate service pack 1 with visual studio 2008. Microsoft as introduced this control with much aware of the present scenario of showing the data in image rather than a grid view or some data viewer controls. Prior to chart controls, developers need to check out for third party tools, some open source libraries or use HTML and GDI+ to draw some graphical image as a chart for the end users which requires more user code and time consuming. Chart controls provide a rich user interface for showing the numbers in a much graphical format where most of the end users are eager to look into. Chart controls are introduced with Visual Studio 2008 as a patch in Service Pack 1. In this article we are going to see how to use the new charting control with visual studio 2010. This article explains the use of chart control from the basic on how to install the required software for making the development environment and finally with a very good example on both web and windows applications.

Visual studio chart control