Which .net charting library should I use?

Question

I would like to draw a realtime chart on a WindowsForm. My platform is the .Net Framework 3.5. What the library should offer:

• Free as in beer
• The results should be pretty... (My standards for pretty are rather low though)
• a HeatMap type of chart would be a big plus
• possibly a lot of data - we are talking about several hundred new datapoints per second

Here are the ones I have found so far:

• NPlot
• Microsoft Chart Controls
• ZedGraph

What are your experiences with the libraries listed above? Are there any other free libraries that you would recommend?

Answer 1

I've used MSChart, and have had good experiences with it. It used to be a commercial product from Dundas (which it seems still to be), but Microsoft procured Dundas and made it free.

Answer 2

I used Microsoft Chart Controls before. It is not bad at all, easy to implement, and has a lot of good examples too, every good for beginners. http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/mschart

However:

1st, it hasn't been updated for a long while since it was released.

2nd, Since it is Microsoft, Comparability is something you dont have much control of

Last, now I generally walked way from using chart controls, and using some javascript chart APIs instead, to me those makes me feel more dry, light weighted, and standard supported.

Google charts (very basic)

And this is a more advanced one: (Jquery) http://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/update_to_jquery_visualize_accessible_charts_with_html5_from_designing_with/

Answer 3

As you maybe already found out the Microsoft chart is just a snapshot from a specific version of Dundas Charts. So if you start with these charts you can easily upgrade to the current version from Dundas, but their prices are far behind free.

Within your question you wrote you have a lot of data and it should be updated in real time you'll run into problems will nearly all the graphs out there. As far as i know the best graph component that can handle a lot of data very fast is National Instruments but these are also not cheap.

So if you really need to show a lot of data in real-time i think there is nothing out there for free.

Answer 4

If you're using Wpf you could take a look at Dynamic data display from the Microsoft Moscow labs.