New Charts

Version 6.2 of Dundas Chart for .NET (Enterprise Edition) gives developers the ability to localise the User Interface elements of Dundas Chart for .NET using an external XML file, thus providing the ability to select the language of their choice. It has extended chart customisation options, and the new “column plus” chart type offers more flexibility from a graphics perspective, letting you saturate existing colours in order to give a much richer look and providing 15 new drawing styles.

Among the new custom chart styles are three types of heat map: rectangular layout, horizontal and vertical. In the heat charts data values are represented by user-selected colours, and you can quickly pinpoint hot spots in the data. The new Sparkline custom chart style, which shows no scales, numbers or references of any kind and just has lines used for comparisons, has been designed to be succinct and to convey a snapshot of trends and variation. The third new custom chart style, Waterfall, is a special type of floating-column chart which typically shows how an initial value is increased and decreased by a series of intermediate values, leading to a final value – useful, for example, for tracking currency prices.

Chart Builder, available within the ASP.NET and Windows Forms Enterprise editions and also available as a separate download, has also been upgraded. Version 3.0 lets you connect to more data sources, style charts quicker, generate more proof-of-concept data and utilise custom chart types. Chart Builder v3.0 is also useful as a debugging tool.