Every now and then when discussing the RadChart export options with customers, we receive the inquiry whether it is possible to export the control to PDF as well. The answer is – YES, it is definitely possible!

While the chart control itself does not provide this feature out-of-the-box, you can easily build upon its export-to-image functionality and export it to PDF using our Documents Format Providers (also part of the RadControls for Silverlight suite).

Basically, all you need to do is construct a document model based on the contents you want to export, and then pass the document to ...

It has been a while since my last blog post on the topic but now that the Q3 2010 release is up and running, it is time to slow down a bit and restart my writing practice as well.

The major highlight for the Data Visualization Team at Telerik for the past months was improving (enabling) the development of real-world business dashboard scenarios with the controls part of the RadControls suite. My colleague Vladimir already blogged about one of our newest additions (the RadSparkline set of controls) and we will be introducing RadBulletGraph in greater detail shortly as well ...

Now that the Q1 2010 release has passed I would like to bring to your attention the official release of one of our newest controls - RadMap for Silverlight [and WPF]. Most of you who are actively involved into the business of data visualization solutions probably are aware that with the Q3 2009 release last year we released a public beta (CTP) version of our map control and it naturally evolved into a fully-fledged control for our current official release.

First of all – a BIG thanks to all of you early adopters, who gave the control a try and ...

I must admit that coming up with a meaningful and relatively short title was really hard this time. Anyway, here is the scenario:

• You have a page layout with Grid panel with several cells and one of the cells is occupied by a RadChart control instance.
• Your requirements indicate that the grid layout should be flexible so you have placed several grid splitters in your panel as well.
• Soon enough, one of your QAs decides to play around with the GridSplitter and notices that the application slows down and becomes irresponsive (and can even crash) when the splitter is dragged ...

One common request that we are receiving recently is how to integrate the RadChart and RadContextMenu controls so they play nicely together.

A typical real-life scenario would probably require that each ChartItem should display different (context-specific) set of menu items. In order to address the increased interest in this functionality we decided to add a new integration example for the Q1 2010 release but for those of you that need something working right now, here is a quick overview of the required steps to add context-specific menu to Bar series items in RadChart (this can be applied to any series ...

Q3 2009 was an exciting release for the Data Visualization Team here at Telerik. My colleague Vladimir already highlighted the most notable new features and improvements to our charting solution and now I would like to draw your attention to one of our newest additions to the control suite – RadMap for Silverlight.

Here are the main highlights:

• Map Sources support – RadMap for Silverlight allows you to visualize rich geographical information from external geo imagery sources.
  • VEMapProvider (Bing Maps)

• EmptyProvider – the Map control also supports empty provider that is not connected to any real imagery service; thanks ...

Every now and then we receive requests / inquiries which wordings may vary, but basically all come down to the same thing – my chart space is limited, how to optimize the content of the ChartArea so my data does not look so squashed?

One possible solution that works in some scenarios is to hide the legend altogether. Today we will propose another option for those of you who are looking for a less “radical” remedy – display the ChartLegend as a ToolTip on demand. Actually, this is quite easy to achieve with the ToolTipService class provided by WPF / ...

RadChart data binding provides a simple and consistent way for applications to present and interact with data. In many cases the data that you work with is a collection of objects and you need the UI to update automatically whenever the datasource gets updated. WPF and Silverlight provide a built-in implementation of a data collection that implements the INotifyCollectionChanged interface and achieves the desired effect.

However, when you try to blend the ObservableCollection<T> implementation with some LINQ queries, the situation gets a bit more complicated and most probably the out-of-the-box result will not match your expectations.

Let us take the ...

RadChart supported point mark visual indicators for chart series like Line, Area, Spline, etc. from version one, however, customization of these indicators was hard and certainly not for the faint-hearted. With the latest version of the control released this week (Q1 2009 SP1) we introduced two major improvements that significantly simplify the interaction with the point mark indicators.

Option 1: Customizing the appearance of the point marks through the PointMark API and predefined point mark shapes

RadChart supports 8 predefined shapes that you can use for the point marks (members of the Telerik.Windows.Controls.Charting.MarkerShape enumeration):

• Circle (default)
• Diamond
• Hexagon
• Triangle...

Now that the RadChart control has officially joined the Silverlight party you are probably considering how to incorporate this jewel in all of your web projects. Probably most of you do not have the luxury to start over from scratch and implement pure Silverlight solutions abandoning all of your ASP.NET knowledge and legacy. With this blog post I will try to provide a simple demonstration how you can take advantage of the RadChart for Silverlight and easily add it to your current ASP.NET web applications. You'll also see how you can update some of the chart properties directly from your ...