Time Series Chart Overview
Sample Application: Usenet Views
How to Add a Time Series Chart to Your Application
The Microsoft Research Community Technologies team has developed two .NET components that render a time series chart. The chart can display multiple time series, each with its own color and glyph style. The chart includes optional numerical scale markings along with axis labels and gridlines. The scales auto-adjust to the time series data, or you can specify absolute scale limits. Here is a sample time series chart:
TimeSeriesChartGenerator is a drawing engine without its own user interface. It takes a set of date/value pairs, generates a time series chart from them, and draws the chart onto a bitmap or Graphics object provided by the caller. It can be used in a variety of environments, including Web applications that generate images on the server for downloading to client browsers.
The TimeSeriesChartControl wraps the TimeSeriesChartGenerator into a Windows Forms control. It can be added to the Visual Studio toolbox and dropped into any Windows Forms application.
Sample Application: Usenet Views
Usenet Views is a .NET Windows Forms application that displays Usenet statistics in a variety of graphical formats. The application's "Newsgroup Time Series" view uses a TimeSeriesChartControl to show how newsgroup activity changes over time. Here, for example, is the microsoft.beta.xpsp2.general newsgroup during the first quarter of 2004. The black line is the number of posts made to the newsgroup, and the blue line is the average line count of the posted messages.
Usenet Views is currently not available outside of Microsoft, but see the Netscan Web site for a related application.
How to Add a Time Series Chart to Your Application
TimeSeriesChartGenerator and TimeSeriesChartControl are just a few of the data visualization components that have been developed by the Microsoft Research Community Technologies team. See the Visualization Components overview for further information.
Questions and comments can be posted to the microsoft.public.research.netscan.discussion newsgroup.