What's New in this Release

The list below describes recent changes and additions to MindFusion.Charting for Silverlight:

New in Version 1.2

Styles and Themes

Styles define the appearance of a given chart element - the axis, the series, the legend. Each ChartTheme is a collection of styles. With MindFusion.Charting for Silverlight you can now:

create themes based on the appearance of an existing chart
create themes with the ThemeEditor tool
save themes to XML files
load themes from XML files
use a number of predefined themes.

The "Working with Themes" tutorial gives detailed information on how to create, save, load and edit themes with MindFusion.Charting for Silverlight.

Better Design Time Support

MindFusion.Charting for Silverlight lets you now edit all collection properties, including the Series collection, the brushes and strokes in design time through the property grid.

Axis Intervals

The new AxisSettings.IntervalCount property lets you specify the exact number of intervals at the axis. In such case the control does not use the Interval property and calculates the value of each interval based on AxisSettings.Min, AxisSettings.Max and AxisSettings.IntervalCount.

API Changes

ChartSeries.Fills, ChartSeries.Strokes, LineSeries.ScatterFills, LineSeries.ScatterStrokes and other properties that were lists with Brush-es are now of type BrushCollection. The change was required by the new design time support features. The properties that are lists with labels or data values are now of type StringCollection and DoubleCollection respectively.
a bug with the Series property in the ChartLegend was fixed.

Important Note:

Due to the extended design time support that we added in this version all predefined data series and brush collections have been removed from the charts. This might lead to exceptions if you reference them. To correct this just create a new instance of the type you are trying to access in the collection.

Wrong:

C# Copy Code
//this will result in an exception, there isn't a predefined series any more.
BarSeries series0 = barChart.Series[0] as BarSeries;

C# Copy Code
//this will result in an exception, there isn't a predefined series any more. BarSeries series0 = barChart.Series[0] as BarSeries;

VB.NET Copy Code
'this will result in an exception, there isn't a predefined series any more.
Dim series0 As BarSeries = TryCast(barChart.Series(0), BarSeries)

VB.NET Copy Code
'this will result in an exception, there isn't a predefined series any more. Dim series0 As BarSeries = TryCast(barChart.Series(0), BarSeries)

Correct:

C# Copy Code
BarSeries series0 = new BarSeries();
barChart.Series.Add(series0);

C# Copy Code
BarSeries series0 = new BarSeries(); barChart.Series.Add(series0);

VB.NET Copy Code
Dim series0 As New BarSeries()
barChart.Series.Add(series0)