I am pretty excited that the new Silverlight Toolkit now supports Stacked Series. If you develop business applications, at some point or another, you will have to produce charts. A while back I looked into the WPF / Silverlight toolkit, which offers charting capabilities, and I really liked it, because its design supports mvvm-style databinding pretty well. There was one major drawback, though: it didn’t include any stacked series. The point of reference for most business users is Excel charts, and this left a large chunk of the standard charts out. Problem solved with the last release: the stacked histogram and some of his friends are in! The Excel “Outdoors Bar” type is still not included, but I don’t think anyone will complain. I can’t wait to play with this release.

Unless you are living (and working) under a rock, if you are a .NET developer, you must have come across the word Silverlight in the past few months. In a nutshell, “Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web”.

I have attended a few presentations about Silverlight recently, and was really impressed by the results. The thing is, demos ARE designed to look good – what they are not designed for is to show you the limitations of the technology. You will find that part on your own, when you start actually using it. I was pretty impressed by what Silverlight could do - I thought it was time for me to check out what Silvelight would actually do for me, on a real example. You can see the final result here.More...