Producing eye-catching charts and layouts is especially important to captivate users and draw them in to explore the data within an application. For the first time ever, both developers and designers will be able to fully "style" chart elements and tightly couple Chart FX for WPF to their application and user interface guidelines.

Chart FX for WPF exploits the openness of XAML, a descriptive markup language for describing managed objects. In practical terms, XAML enables other development roles, such as graphics designers and usability experts to contribute to the application development process. For example, a designer opens and edits a Visual Studio project in Microsoft's Expression Blend to gain access to drawings and animations without its associated confusing code and callbacks. On the other hand, a developer need not be concerned with how these drawings or animations work or how they were constructed.

Also, Chart FX exploits the WPF layout engine to allow chart elements to flow naturally in the chart area; no chart element is absolutely positioned, allowing for more flexible and intelligent resizing within the application.

Although XAML is used throughout Chart FX for WPF, you don't need specific XAML knowledge to use Chart FX for WPF or to customize the Chart FX presentation or UI layer. Much of this functionality has already been integrated or will be integrated into the product. Nevertheless, XAML is going to become a factor that should at least be familiar when developing WPF applications.

Before WPF, many charting vendors attempted, unsuccessfully, to integrate Direct3D as the preferred 3D drawing engine. Although Direct3D provided an excellent 3D platform for game vendors, it was not technically feasible for a charting product for developers.

Firstly, lack of integration to the IDE made it difficult for developers to easily integrate Direct3D in their applications; performance and scalability issues prevented it from being deployed in the complex web server and client architectures; client-side requirements made it difficult for end users to properly configure or support in an enterprise computing environment. Lastly but more importantly, Direct3D was not an integral part of the OS.

With WPF Microsoft is supporting animated 3D meshes with video materials, sub-pixel clear type text, 2D animation with vector-based shapes and more. All of this is made possible by the underlying WPF engine which is hardware accelerated and integrates these different media into a common experience and foundation that is easy to program and deploy.

Chart FX fully exploits WPF's 3D capabilities to allow developers to support true 3D charts in their applications by supporting materials and lighting without sacrificing the application's performance, scalability, integration or look and feel. In addition, Chart FX for WPF uses 3D in subtle but powerful ways to enhance its user experience, employing this third dimension to provide intuitive user interface metaphors. One of the capabilities that WPF provides is the ability to render 2D visual elements on 3D surface. For example, you can place panels, text blocks and images. These animated 3D visual elements are used to provide powerful navigation tools to slice and dice data.

Simply put, Chart FX for WPF breaks ground on new powerful real-world UI metaphors!

The idea is that users can select any of the chart elements they would like to manipulate and provide compelling user interfaces to make the process of analyzing data more powerful and intuitive.

For example, Chart FX for WPF uses 3D animation to scale, rotate, and move charts within the application in response to user actions and other events. Also, animations are used to draw attention to UI elements or to simply transition an element to a new state (i.e. drill down, rotation, scrolling). Animations are also used with 2D graphics; for example animated 3D surfaces and layering/angling windows have become very popular among early adopters of Chart FX for WPF.

Through the magic of WPF data binding and LINQ, you could easily populate a chart based on other controls, XML files, databases and other underlying data.

Chart FX for WPF will feature robust LINQ functionality. A LINQ-enabled chart will help developers access data in a more intuitive and programmer-centric manner. The chart will not be just limited to plotted numbers but other informational data that can be used to enhance the experience as a response to user actions and other events (rich content). In addition, Chart FX for WPF provides a way for you to specify how you want to group, filter or sort your data items, giving way to new data analysis scenarios.

Rich content is perhaps one of the most promising features in Chart FX for WPF, allowing innovative user interactivity scenarios not previously possible in Win32 or .NET development. For example, Chart FX for WPF can host a more complex set of data associated to series in the chart giving users zoom control of to inspect that data with closer scrutiny and page through the results.

In light of the release of Visual Studio 2008 and other important WPF tools like Expression Blend, Software FX places a high importance on maintaining programmability, developer productivity and IDE integration.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008+

Microsoft's newest Visual Studio includes XAML Intellisense support through schema extensions for the editor, project templates for the Windows Presentation Foundation and the .NET Framework 3.0, and .NET Framework 3.0 SDK documentation integration. Developers can open XAML created (by designers) in Microsoft Expression Blend.

Microsoft Expression Blend

This tool aims to ease collaboration between designers and programmers by using XAML to describe user interface elements in a single format rather than constantly translating between formats that are targeted squarely at one job or the other.