Hello everyone,

Today, we begin a new and exciting video series on Telerik’s RadCharts for Windows Phone 7. What is RadCharts you may ask? RadChart is intuitive and easy-to-use charts designed for the mobile environment. RadChart offers 20 chart series out-of-the-box and is designed for super-fast loading and real-time updates.  The control’s intuitive object model and public API allow complex charts to be easily setup either in XAML or through code-behind.

Now that we know what RadChart is, let’s take a look at the roadmap for the series.

The Roadmap for the series:

I’ve included the Roadmap for the series below as you may want to visit other sections as you learn about RadChart for Windows Phone 7. If you want a specific topic covered then please leave it in the comments below.

In order to fully understand the capabilities of the RadChart, we will start with the basics:

• How to create bar charts and the differences among them (Horizontal, Vertical, Stacked, etc) (source code)
• How to create line charts and the differences among them (Line, Spline, Area, Stacked Area)
• How to create pie, scatter and polar area charts

Then move into exciting new Chart Features such as:

• Live feed, Performance, Zoom and Pan and much much more.

And finally finish up with Dashboards

• How to use the chart with the gauge control with sales or customer data.
• Understanding the benefits of using the RadBulletGraph for financial data

Part 1: Creating Bar Charts and the differences amongst them.

In this part, we are creating the following 5 charts from scratch:

Bar Chart – One of the most common charts is the bar chart. The RadChart is easily able to visualize data points as bars. Each bar can have a different style which can encode arbitrary information or simply differentiate a bar from the others.

Bar Charts – Vertical: The bar series can be displayed vertically in both directions based on the values of the underlying data, notice how the vertical axis expands to provide negative values.

Bar Charts – Horizontal: The bar series can also be displayed horizontally in both directions with negative values extending to the left and positive values extending to the right.

Bar Charts – Stacked Vertical: This bar series can be stacked on each other with the CombineMode property of the axes. Since some bars can be shorter and also be behind other bars, the combine mode allows such cases to be avoided by arranging the bars as a stack.

Bar Charts – Stacked Horizontal: The stack combine mode also works for horizontally plotted series.

Wrap-Up

Also, keep watching the Telerik blogs as we are planning on releasing more chart videos for Windows Phone 7 shortly. You can also download a trial right now.