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:
see more Funny Graphs
see more Funny Graphs
