Happy Thursday to all you XAML-lovers out there! I'm back from the trenches with a new initiative aimed at teaching you how to use both new and existing controls from the Telerik RadControls for Silverlight and RadControls for WPF control suites. Starting today, every Thursday you'll be able to find a fresh batch of videos and sample projects highlighting a different control in a little series we're calling XAMLflix. The best part is that since we share a common codebase and API between our Silverlight and WPF suites you only have to learn how to use these controls once and can carry those skills over between frameworks. Pretty neat, right?

Say Hello, RadChartView

For anyone who has been with us for a bit, RadChartView actually first appeared in our Q3 2011 release with a beta tag stuck to it. Since then we've received a lot of feedback and wanted to use this as the pilot control for this new video content series, especially considering RadChartView goes official in our upcoming Q1 2012 release!

Rather than just direct you to the demos, while they are quite nice to look at, I wanted to give you a brief introduction to this new control with five videos meant to get you up and running. Without further delay, here's what we've got for today:

• Introducing RadChartView - A brief walkthrough how you can get up and running with nothing more than the Visual Studio designer and our designer widget for creating pre-defined charts. A must for anyone brand new to RadChartView! (Download the Project)
• Using RadCartesianChart - Walking through creating a new RadCartesianChart, including setting the chart Grid, picking out both horizontal and vertical axis, as well as defining a chart series and hooking it up to data. (Download the Project)
• Using RadPolarChart - Same as above, except this time with RadPolarChart! (Download the Project)
• Using the Pan and Zoom Behavior - Starting with a RadCertesianChart, see how quickly you can enable as well as customize the Pan and Zoom behavior.  (Download the Project)
• Using the TrackBall Behavior - After a quick review of the new RadCartesianChart, see how 5 lines of XAML can add the TrackBall behavior to your charts and how quickly you can customize how data is displayed. (Download the Project)

So grab a cup of coffee and take these videos and their sample projects for a spin. And courtesy of our shared API and codebase the projects are replicated between Silverlight and WPF, so regardless of which framework you are on you can see how these work.

Stay tuned for the next installment of XAMLflix next week!

@EvanHutnick