Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 introduces a whole new set of .NET technologies that will revolutionize, once again, the way you develop smart client and web-based applications; the most notable being LINQ, WPF and, of course, Silverlight. For most of us working in and around web application development in the business world, Silverlight is a big step forward; especially if you consider that it provides clean coding practices with extensible languages (e.g. XAML and C#). It also provides some of Visual Studio’s rich programming model that we have become accustomed to and can no longer live without; such as class libraries, debugging capabilities and IntelliSense among many others.

Silverlight (especially from 1.1 onwards) can be used by .NET developers to create cross platform browser-based content with genuinely interactive client-side functionality that doesn’t rely on a sticky tape of AJAX. Microsoft has been working diligently with third party vendors, like Software FX, to open Silverlight to the vast goodwill that Microsoft partners have to offer.

Unfortunately, much of this effort has not been exposed yet as most vendors continue their Silverlight and Visual Studio 2008 integration efforts. At Software FX, we couldn’t wait to put our hands on Silverlight and try to build a Chart FX version that you could work with today. In the end, we were able to implement a Silverlight solution based on Chart FX 7 which will allow you to take advantage of tomorrow’s technology with tools you are familiar with today. In addition, this paper will help you understand Silverlight from a control vendor perspective. It sheds light on some of the cool aspects of Silverlight as well as some of the integration limitations we found along the way. We acknowledge that some of these limitations are temporary and will be quickly addressed by Microsoft in subsequent releases of Silverlight, Visual Studio and Blend. In the meantime, you can use this information as an integration guideline for Chart FX with Silverlight 1.1, Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, and Microsoft Expression Blend 2 (September 2007 Preview).

Download pdf Chart FX Shines for Silverlight TM Today