In yesterday's announcement of the December 08 release of Charting for Silverlight, I outlined some of the new Charting features and mentioned a forthcoming update to my ChartBuilder tool to show off the new features. (Background reading for ChartBuilder: Introduction and "user's guide", Updates.)

The new ChartBuilder is now live on the web - and I've even updated my sample screenshot! :)

You can click this text or the image below to run the latest ChartBuilder in your browser.

ChartBuilder

[And click here to download the complete ChartBuilder source code.]

Release notes:

  • Added support for new series type BubbleSeries. To keep thing simple and avoid needing to specify another set of values, the bubble size is bound to the dependent value of the series.
  • Added support for the new Independent(Range|Category)Axis and Dependent(Range|Category)Axis properties of the Column/Bar/Line/Scatter/Bubble series types. Off by default, either axis can be enabled by checking the relevant box in the settings panel for a series - then customized as always.
  • Added a ToolTip for the "Axes" header label to display the current value of the Chart.ActualAxes property in pseudo-XAML. More of a diagnostic aid than anything, this information can help understand the interaction between axes and series - and what's really going on behind the scenes.
  • Increased the maximum number of stand-alone Axis instances from 2 to 4 now that multiple axes are supported.
  • Various other improvements.
  • Updated the version to 2008-12-07.

ChartBuilder continues to be tremendously useful to me as an interactive Charting test application. The plethora of knobs, dials, and switches that represent a user experience designer's worst nightmare [ :) ] enable a degree of scenario testing that has helped find and fix a wide variety of issues. Furthermore, the interactive nature of the tool - and the ease with which it enables mocking up samples for answers on the Silverlight Controls and Silverlight Toolkit forum - has really seemed to help people understand Charting more easily.

My hope is that ChartBuilder can be just as useful to you - so if you've got ideas after using it, please let me know!