I think it’s safe to say that charting is a key part of many applications run on company Intranets.  People like to see data visually as opposed to viewing it in rows and columns sometimes (especially higher level managers).  While there are many 3rd party solutions available that provide charting solutions, you now have access to a very powerful solution from Microsoft that won’t set you back any $$ at all.  Translated…it’s free!  Sure, some of you may think that “free” products aren’t good but that’s not the case here.  The new Chart control can generate visually stunning 2D and 3D charts without a lot of work on your part.  In fact, there are over 25 different chart types that you can select for use in your ASP.NET or Windows Forms applications.

In a previous post I demonstrated how templates could be used along with styles in Silverlight 2 applications to customize controls. By using templates you can change colors, shapes, sizes and much more on a given control. Here’s an example of a standard Silverlight 2 Button control with a custom template applied:

Silverlight 2 allows styles to be defined to prevent duplication of attributes across controls in a XAML file. In a previous post I demonstrated how styles could be defined and used. As a review, here's an example of defining a style named ButtonStyle that targets a Button control:

Back in the early days when Silverlight still had the WPF/e code name I put together a sample application that showed how to access album data from Amazon.com to display a 3D carousel.  When Silverlight 1 was released I upgraded it which was straightforward since JavaScript was used for just about everything anyway.  I’ve had a Silverlight 2 version available for a few months now but had to wait until the official release to make it available (and had some other priorities :-)).  The upgrade was quite a bit more involved this time around since I had to convert all of the JavaScript to C#.  It still went really smoothly although I’m certain that many improvements can be made. 

Controls are where it’s at these days in the programming world.  By using them you maximize re-use, enhance productivity and avoid building custom functionality.  Plus, when you need a control to do something different you can always extend it rather than writing everything from scratch.