Andy Douglas

Currently (12-8-09) there are only a couple free options for creating custom charting solutions in Silverlight / WCF.  One is to utilize Microsoft’s new Silverlight 3 Toolkit (http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight) and the other is Visifire Charts (http://www.visifire.com/).  At this point in time, it seems to me that Visifire is clearly a more sophisticated solution in terms of look-and-feel as well as offering more chart types from which to choose.  Visifire is free under the terms of the Gnu Public License, but requires a commercial license if the GPL doesn’t apply.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, 12-9-09, I will deliver a mini-presentation to the Sogeti Microsoft Practice to demonstrate Visifire Charts.  I will explain the options of how to implement it, and show off my simple “VisifireWrapper” application.  VisifireWrapper (see the .zip attachment to this post) seeks to ease implementing Visifire Charts in cases where either static XML or dynamically-created Visifire-specific XML is too cumbersome or otherwise undesirable.  Note that in order to make use of VisifireWrapper, you’ll need to have Visual Studio 2008 and Silverlight 3 (and possibly other downloads available for free from Microsoft).

Click here for slides from the presentation and the VisifireWrapper application.