Best charting tool for silverlight and wpf

Question

I came across the following till now

visifire

Teechart

Silverlight toolkit chart

Dundas

has anyone worked on a charting project in silverlight/wpf !! which charting tool would you recommend ?

I want to make a wrapper around charts for historical/real time data . Want the chart to have a datamodel which can be extended easily .

I am looking for a finance domain Fx charting tool for technical analysts , which i can customize/extend as needed , it should work with SL3 and WPF .

Some findings

MVVM support = Toolkit has it via xaml support , Steema is releasing the xaml support in 16 th August release

Features = Steema has the most out of the box features including tools for lines/rects and financial functions support . also the Steema object model is very easy to understand as compared to visifire . Toolkit is a basic set as of now , am sure later versions will make it more feature rich .

Silverlight Support - Steema and Visifire both have good support . toolkit examples can be found everywhere . Steema has a stable version for wpf/silverlight , although as a side note i would say they are still rounding the edges on a few financial functions for SL/WPF versions , but rest works well .

Extensibility - silverlight toolkit and steema are great . Toolkit doesnt have as many out of the box features as steema .

Recently found , that Dundas has silverlight addon , but they dont have anything on WPF yet .

Answer 1

In my opinion I would go with the Silverlight Toolkit chart (for Silverlight 3). I haven't tried TeeChart, but I didn't really like visifire and the Toolkit chart had everything I needed.

Answer 2

I've had a lot of good luck using Visifire, but I'm currently using the Silverlight Toolkit for charting needs. The level of customization is outstanding and I really like the presentation. It's easy to use, too. Best of all, there are a ton of blog posts out there demonstrating how to use various facets of the charting controls.

This is a great resource for some of those charting posts.

Answer 3

I've been using Telerik's charting for a while and I'm pretty happy with what they offer. Besides, the support is great.

Silverlight Demo:

http://demos.telerik.com/silverlight/#Chart/FirstLook

Note: available for WPF as well: http://demos.telerik.com/wpf/

Answer 4

I've been evaluating Silverlight charts recently. The ones I've checked are: Chart FX (commercial) - more of a wrapper around a server-side image generator

Dundas (comemrcial) - functionality is alright but the Silverlight version seems to have much more limited possiblities opposed to the original version. Documentation is good, data binding is done with some wrapper class, quite interesting.

NetAdvantage (commercial) - flashy and nice diagrams but slow

Telerik RAD (commercial) - nice charts, good documentation and lots of different charts supported. Not really fast as far as I've noticed

Silverlight Toolkit - free and lightweight. Doesn't support as many charts as the others but is highly customizable and has great data binding support and lots of samples are provided

Visifire - free (or can buy a commercial license as well) - nice charts, good documentation. Currently no databinding is supported, series have to be added by code.

All charts claim to support live update. If I were you I might either go with an open source version so you can dig into the code if needed or if you're willing to pay I would approach Dundas or Telerik, they seem to be the two most advanced vendors and see if they match your needs.

Note that I have no information on Steema yet.