Howdy folks! It has been a while since I last blogged. To compensate for it, however, I am bringing some exciting news to our loyal RadChart users.

While not blogging I have been busy working with two of the smartest people in our company to bring you some really dramatic performance improvements to RadChart. I have to admit that in the past performance was not paramount for our product. We focused on features, appearance, ease of use to produce one of the most versatile charting components on the market. Today, however, marks the beginning of another direction. Starting with the ...

It has been a busy Q for the data visualization team at telerik! Our flagship chart product saw many improvements and new features the last four months and today I will summarize the most important ones for you. Here are the 5 big ones:

1. Grouping and Aggregation – RadChart now utilizes our powerful data engine already present in the RadGridView control to allow for a really fast grouping and aggregation of data. This comes built-in and works with all supported data sources! You can read more here.

2. Multiple YAxis support – RadChart will now allow you ...

Howdy folks! The RadControls for XAML Q3 Beta1 is out and it features an updated version of the RadChart control. We receive dozens of feature requests every day and one of the more substantial ones is the ability to analyze data with RadChart. The feature I will describe today is a great step in that direction. I’m talking of course about data grouping and aggregation.

Just like grouping and aggregate functions are one of the major features of our GridView control they can be used with the charts as well (if you have the beta). Basically the feature allows ...

Good news everyone! Exporting Silverlight charts to images has been a common request for our Silverlight chart. I’m glad to announce that the functionality is already done and checked in our development branch. This means that everything is on track for the Q3 2009 release (and maybe a beta release before that!).

But why not for Q2? Well, there are a couple of reasons. Q2 release was still Silverlight 2 based and there were technological difficulties that didn’t allow us to implement this feature. Firstly, Silverlight 2 didn’t have the writeable bitmap class which facilitates rasterizing the chart rendering ...

Seamless operation with diverse data sources is paramount for any data visualization solution. RadChart already supports automatic data binding to IEnumerable sources as seen in this example: http://demos.telerik.com/silverlight/#Chart/DataBinding. With the growing of Silverlight data sources and support for various data services, however, a new scenario is becoming more common: data binding to a collection of collections or nested collections. I am glad to announce that a new feature is coming in the Q2 2009 release which will make this automatic.

Consider the following code snippet:

There’s an emerging trend to integrate cool new silverlight controls into existing production asp.net solutions. And why wouldn’t it be there? There are many  asp.net applications in production out there that have been working quite well and don’t need to be replaced by a completely new technology. Wouldn’t it be nice, however, to spice them up a little with some rich silverlight visualization tools? This is exactly what a lot of our customers have been asking for lately. Well, here you can see some resources we published that will help anyone who wants to plug in RadChart for Silverlight in ...

It’s an absolute pleasure to share some bit of good news with all our customers and fans. One of our secret Telerik Labs projects is shaping up pretty well.

As the title suggests, its a homebrew Silverlight 2 3D engine with perspective and lightning (more features are in the works). Since the movie Pink Panther 2 is coming out soon we decided it will be cool to show off the technology with our own 3D Silverlight pink panther. Enter the panther!

(Click the picture to start the demo)

While this is only a pink panther you can probably imagine the ...

As a component vendor we need to be extra cautious about the quality of the code we ship. Design, presentation, performance etc. are all very important for us. One item that is often overlooked in the .NET community is memory leaks. It is a quite a precarious issue, because most people believe that in the managed world it is not possible to have a memory leak. Well, if you thought so you are in for a surprise.

The idea of the blog post is not to explain what memory leaks are, how the garbage collector works and so on. These ...

The Telerik charting team is hard at work on making our WPF chart compatible with Silverlight. In the process we are faced with numerous limitations of SL. One of the more cunning problems I’ve faced was the fact that there are still no layout transforms available which leads to some wacky problems when you try to rotate text.

Let’s assume a very simple layout consisting of a single grid with two columns, one with width=”auto”  and the other with width=”*”. The first column contains a string of text. Here is how it looks before any transforms are applied:

<Grid  ...

One of the most common requests we got after the Q3 2008 release was to improve our label customization. Well I believe many of you will be pleasantly surprised to learn that we will most certainly deliver on those expectations for the Q3 SP1 release and then some!

This news is really twofold. The first part is the support for custom format strings in our axis and series items labels. What this means is that with the SP1 release of RadChart for WPF you will be able to apply all .NET supported standard numeric format strings. The easiest way ...