The blog of dlaa.me

Now that Data Visualization is part of the Silverlight Toolkit and the WPF Toolkit, it has an official release vehicle for both platforms of interest. This is great because it means that any customers who need to be running signed bits from an official release have a place to get what they need. Of course, because the two Toolkits are not on the same ship schedule, there will probably always be a delta between them: some features or fixes that are present for one platform but not the other. Fortunately, the release cadence for the Toolkits is pretty short (on the order of months), so it won't take long for features to make their way into both releases.

But for folks who always want to be running the latest-and-greatest stuff, that wait can feel like an eternity... :) The good news is that both Toolkits are Ms-Pl open source, so anyone can migrate code between the two. (And, in fact, I made some small tweaks recently to make that even easier!) But why should everyone have to reinvent the wheel? Wouldn't it be better if one person simplified the process and shared the results with everybody? Yeah, I thought so too...

 

Announcing Silverlight/WPF Data Visualization Development Release 0!

The Silverlight/WPF Data Visualization Development Release is a side project of mine to make it easier for Silverlight and WPF customers to get their hands on the latest Data Visualization code for both platforms. From time to time, I plan to release a single, comprehensive ZIP file with the complete Data Visualization source code, projects for all supported platforms, a unifying solution, and pre-compiled release-mode binaries for all supported platforms (unsigned). These development releases will contain the latest internal source code changes with all the fixes and features that are in progress. Interested parties can evaluate the newest stuff and provide early feedback on what works and what's broken - feedback that can help ensure the things you care about get some love and attention.

The catch - and there's always a catch - is that I'm not committing to any kind of schedule for these releases - and they won't be as thoroughly tested as what's in the official Toolkit releases. But if that doesn't bother you, I'd love to have your feedback!

 

[Please click here to download the complete SilverlightWpfDataVisualization solution.]

 

Release Notes

• The source code for Development Release 0 is identical to what's included with the recent Silverlight Toolkit July 09 release, so there are no new features for the Silverlight assembly. However, the WPF assembly includes the new TreeMap control and a better performing BubbleSeries! (Please see my release announcement and notes for more information about what TreeMap is and how to use it.)
• Please remember that whenever you add a project reference to the Data Visualization assembly on WPF, you also need to add a reference to WPFToolkit.dll or you'll get weird runtime errors because the Visual State Manager (VSM) isn't available.
• The file structure of the archive looks like this (highlighted items are files; everything else is directories):

  SilverlightWpfDataVisualization
  |   SilverlightWpfDataVisualization.sln
  +---Binaries
  |   +---Silverlight3
  |   |       System.Windows.Controls.DataVisualization.Toolkit.dll
  |   |       
  |   \---WPF35
  |           System.Windows.Controls.DataVisualization.Toolkit.dll
  |           WPFToolkit.dll
  +---Platforms
  |   +---Silverlight3
  |   |   |   Core.Silverlight3.csproj
  |   |   +---Properties
  |   |   \---Themes
  |   \---WPF35
  |       |   Core.WPF35.csproj
  |       +---Properties
  |       \---Themes
  \---SourceCode
      \---Core
          +---Charting
          |   +---Axis
          |   +---Chart
          |   +---DataPoint
          |   +---Primitives
          |   \---Series
          +---Collections
          +---Legend
          +---Properties
          +---Title
          \---TreeMap
              +---Interpolators
              \---Layout

  The pre-compiled release-mode binaries are located under the Binaries directory. All the common source code is under the SourceCode directory. Platform-specific project and source files are under the Platforms directory. The unified Visual Studio solution is in the root.
• Design-time assemblies are not part of this release because I don't expect the target audience to make changes to them and also because they add a lot of complexity. However, if there's strong interest in having the design-time assemblies included with future development releases, I'm open to doing so.
• I haven't updated my DataVisualizationDemos application for this unofficial release, but it's fairly easy to file-link the included TreeMap sample page into the WPF project to get those TreeMap samples running on WPF. (And that's exactly what I did to make sure TreeMap still works well on WPF!)

 

This whole idea of doing development releases is a bit of an experiment for me and I'm interested to see how it works out... If folks really love the idea, I'll try to do development releases more frequently. Or if it's simply too much churn for everyone to keep up with, people can always just wait for the next official Silverlight/WPF Toolkit release to come around. But however people get at it, I hope the Silverlight/WPF Data Visualization project helps customers continue to do great things with Silverlight and WPF!!