Microsoft Releases Charting Control as VS2008 Add-on

As you may (or may not) know, a while back Microsoft purchased some charting functionality from Dundas, to be included as part of Reporting Services for SQL Server 2008. Well, now they have packaged up this functionality as a control for Visual Studio 2008! This is a fantastic add-on, as we now have the power, flexibility, and visual excellence of the old Dundas chart control as a free Visual Studio 2008 add-on!


Scott Guthrie has an excellent blog post discussing it, which can be found here.


Scott specifcially talks about ASP.NET, and a few of the commenters on his blog ask the obvious question: Can this be used for Winforms apps as well? I went ahead and installed the add-on, and the new Chart control can indeed be dropped into Winforms apps as well as ASP.NET!


Lastly, I got curious as to whether or not this control could be used from Visual Studio 2005. It doesn’t show up in the toolbox automatically, but it can be added and does indeed work in VS2005!

In addition to the above samples, you can download the Microsoft Chart Control Documentation