How do you graph with Silverlight inside a ASP.NET v3.5 application?

Question

I have the need to do some graphing (bar, chart, pie, trend) and instead of using Infragistics or manually drawing the graphs I want to use Silverlight.

My current ASP.NET application was upgraded to 3.5 and I have added a Silverlight Application project. Consuming the output inside of the existing master.page layout or inside of user controls does not seem to be as intuitive as I was hoping for.

Nor is the ability to create a graph from a generics listing of data even a control (like I have seen in several demonstrations at PDC08). Any ideas?

Answer 1

I would suggest starting with the Silverligt toolkit (released at PDC) which includes a Silverlight chart control. There is an overview of how to use this control post here.

The important difference between Silverlight charting and ASP.Net forum based charting (using a third party control) is that the Silverlight chart will execute on the client while the asp.net chart would execute on the server. So if you want to use this type of control you will need to expose your chart data as a service.

Another option to do Silverlight charting but have your code execute on the client side is to build your Xaml using ASP.Net. In this case you would create your chart Xaml using ASP.Net which instead of generating HTML output would generate Xaml output.

If you want an example let me know...