Charting

April 24th, 2009 by jason Leave a reply »

I have been doing a lot of  graphics work lately, mostly in Silverlight.  My latest task was to create a simple pie chart.  There are several open source Silveright charting solutions online, including the charting built in to the Silverlight Control Toolkit.  I decided to write my own pie chart for a couple of reasons.  I wanted something that was light-weight to download, and I wanted to learn a little about drawing charts in Silverlight.  I also needed to write a server-side pie chart to handle the case of a user that does not have Silverlight installed.  As it turns out, Microsoft also has a charting solution for this.  However, I resorted to writing my own GDI+ pie chart for this.  Their new ASP.Net charting solution turned out to be difficult to integrate with our product.

In my research into charts I found a graph site that has nothing to do with programming, GraphJam. As I have mentioned before, I have been relearning some of my high-school math.  Algebra, Geometry and Trigonometry have all come into play (in their simplest forms) in drawing various shapes to the screen in Silverlight.  I found the chart at the bottom of the page funny.  My wife and I love the History Channel when they are actually showing shows about, um, history, so the first chart also got a good chuckle from me.  Here are the two charts:

History Channel Programming Line-Up
see more Funny Graphs

Amount of use I get from Trigonometry
see more Funny Graphs

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