In today's enterprise applications nobody is going to comment on the quality of your middle-tier components or the databases to which you persist your application's data. Enterprise applications, like all others, are judged using the age-old adage: first impressions count. Essentially, your applications are judged on the quality of the user interface.

Integrating advanced business and scientific charting into your application is a breeze with Chart FX for .NET, which supports both Windows Forms and ASP.NET Web applications.

Chart FX integrates into the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2002 and 2003 environments, allowing you to simply place the control on the form and then customize the appearance of the chart using the associated wizard (see Figure 1), which is also available through a menu item if you right-click on the chart at any other time.

Connecting the chart to a data source is essentially as easy as connecting a data grid control to a data source; Chart FX supports several data sources, including ADO.NET (such as data sets and data readers), collection classes, and XML.

Another feature of the Chart FX integration with Visual Studio .NET is the fact that the help system is available through the MSDN library, enabling you to simply find information regarding a particular class by pressing F1 when the class name is selected in code.

Although the help integration doesn't particularly make Chart FX stand out from the crowd, what does is the Chart FX resource center (see Figure 2), which - in addition to a fully documented API - provides access to code samples for all of the available chart types within Chart FX, which number more than 50 out of the box.

Using the resource center to catapult your development you will be able to become proficient with the Chart FX component library within a matter of a few hours. As you continue to use more advanced features of Chart FX, such as borders, gradients, transparency, and palettes, the resource center will help you gradually master the nearly 800 properties, methods, and events that the Chart FX library exposes to the developer.

Another excellent feature of Chart FX is the printed manual supplied with the product at no additional cost. Personally, I don't have two high-resolution screens on my desk to view the MSDN integrated help library and the Visual Studio .NET environment at the same time. Îf you're a component vendor who doesn't ship a printed manual, then think seriously about doing so!

Software FX also provides users with access to peer newsgroups through the company's newsgroup server, allowing you to ask questions of peer users in addition to the engineers working on the Chart FX product.

Chart FX offers a myriad of different chart types with the standard product. However, you can purchase additional packages such as Chart FX OLAP, Maps, Statistical, Financial, and Wireless, for applications requiring more specialized charting functionality.

Of course you can also use the object-oriented nature of the charting components to create your own extensions to the Chart FX components.

Currently, Software FX has a paper on their Web site entitled "Software FX gets a taste of its own medicine" (www.softwarefx.com/SFXDownloads/PDFs/CFX_Ext_WP.pdf), which is an interesting read on how the company ported their existing intranet site to use the .NET Framework and their .NET charting component. If your company, like many, has both Java and .NET applications, Software FX offers charting solutions using COM and Java too!

If you're looking to integrate advanced charting into your .NET applications, then you can certainly accelerate the development of charting within your applications with Chart FX.

Company Info
Software FX
5200 Town Center Circle
Tower 1, Suite 450
Boca Raton, FL 33486
Phone: 800 392.4278
E-mail: sales@softwarefx.com

Test Environment
Pentium IV 2.4 GHz with 512MB RAM, Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1

Pricing
Chart FX for .NET: $2699
Chart FX for .NET + 1 Yr. Priority Support Program: $2999
Additional Development Seat: $899
Additional Production Server: $1599

About The Author
Doug Holland, a professional .NET consultant based in Roseville, CA, has over eight years of experience in designing and developing software. Doug currently works with the .NET Framework and specializes in consulting for companies using IBM Rational XDE for .NET development. doug.holland@precisionobjects.com