Microsoft Releases ASP.NET Charting Control

I missed this a week or so ago when it happened so it may be old news by now but... Microsoft has recently released a free set of charting controls for ASP.NET 3.5.

While ASP.NET has long had a wide variety of excellent charting options from 3rd-party vendors such as ComponentArt and Telerik, this is the first robust suite of charts available directly from Microsoft.  To sweeten the deal, these controls are completely free while 3rd-party tools are typically expensive and may be cost-prohibitive for smaller projects.

The controls support pretty much what you'd expect from a charting suite...from regular pie and bar charts to more complex charts like candlestick displays for financial data and AJAX-enabled interactive charts.  The controls dynamically render cachable image files to display the charts in 2D and 3D formats which look clean and professional.  They also support  both static data defined in the control itself as well as databinding syntax for creating charts dynamically from data within your database.

It's nice to see Microsoft continue to build upon the ASP.NET platform by continuing to release new features and controls like this.

Download the Microsoft Chart Controls

Download the Chart Controls Add-on for Visual Studio 2008

Download the Chart Controls Samples

Download the Chart Controls Documentation

Check out the Microsoft Chart Control Forum