I am super excited to announce the January 2013 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit! I have one word to describe this release and that word is “Charts” – we’ve added lots of great new chart controls to the Ajax Control Toolkit.
You can download the new release directly from http://AjaxControlToolkit.CodePlex.com – or, just fire the following command from the Visual Studio Library Package Manager Console Window (NuGet):
You also can view the new chart controls by visiting the “live” Ajax Control Toolkit Sample Site.
5 New Ajax Control Toolkit Chart Controls
The Ajax Control Toolkit contains five new chart controls: the AreaChart, BarChart, BubbleChart, LineChart, and PieChart controls.
Here is a sample of each of the controls:
AreaChart:
BarChart:
BubbleChart:
LineChart:
PieChart:
We realize that people love to customize the appearance of their charts so all of the chart controls include properties such as color properties.
The chart controls render the chart on the browser using SVG. The chart controls are compatible with any browser which supports SVG including Internet Explorer 9 and new and recent versions of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari. (If you attempt to display a chart on a browser which does not support SVG then you won’t get an error – you just won’t get anything).
Updates to the HTML Sanitizer
If you are using the HtmlEditorExtender on a public-facing website then it is really important that you enable the HTML Sanitizer to prevent Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks. The HtmlEditorExtender uses the HTML Sanitizer by default.
The HTML Sanitizer strips out any suspicious content (like JavaScript code and CSS expressions) from the HTML submitted with the HtmlEditorExtender. We followed the recommendations of OWASP and ha.ckers.org to identify suspicious content.
We updated the HTML Sanitizer with this release to protect against new types of XSS attacks. The HTML Sanitizer now has over 220 unit tests. The Ajax Control Toolkit team would like to thank Gil Cohen who helped us identify and block additional XSS attacks.
Change in Ajax Control Toolkit Version Format
We ran out of numbers. The Ajax Control Toolkit was first released way back in 2006. In previous releases, the version of the Ajax Control Toolkit followed the format: Release Year + Date. So, the previous release was 60919 where 6 represented the 6th release year and 0919 represent September 19.
Unfortunately, the AssembyVersion attribute uses a UInt16 data type which has a maximum size of 65,534. The number 70123 is bigger than 65,534 so we had to change our version format with this release.
Fortunately, the AssemblyVersion attribute actually accepts four UInt16 numbers so we used another one. This release of the Ajax Control Toolkit is officially version 7.0123. This new version format should work for another 65,000 years.
And yes, I realize that 7.0123 is less than 60,919, but we ran out of numbers.
Summary
I hope that you find the chart controls included with this latest release of the Ajax Control Toolkit useful. Let me know if you use them in applications that you build. And, let me know if you run into any issues using the new chart controls. Next month, back to improving the File Upload control – more exciting stuff.
Good job! SVG charts as Web Forms controls were much needed addition to the toolbox of Web Forms developers.
Just for curiosity, why the chart controls? ASP.NET already has charting… ok, it doesn’t use SVG, but I don’t think it really matters to most users, there are lots of examples of using AJAX.
Thanks!
Hi Ricardo,
Our goal was to make it incredibly easy to generate charts in an ASP.NET Web Forms app using the latest web technologies such as SVG. The existing ASP.NET Chart controls generate server-side images, we wanted to generate the images on the client-side. This places less load on the server and, long term, will enable us to do things like create interactive charts and display chart animations.
Hi, Stephen! Thanks for your reply!
OK, but IMO that should go along with some JavaScript API for manipulating the chart. For the moment, there is no documentation on that available, will there be some?
Hi Ricardo,
It is unlikely that there ever will be a JavaScript API — if you are comfortable using a JavaScript API then you should consider using something other than the Ajax Control Toolkit for charting (there are some nice jQuery charts plugins). The Ajax Control Toolkit is designed to fit with the ASP.NET Web Forms server experience of building websites. In my comment above, I meant that the Ajax Control Toolkit charts, because they are created client-side, can support better client-side interactions such as the tooltips which currently popup when you hover over bubbles in the BubbleChart control and the client-side animations which appear when the charts are rendered.
Hi, just a suggestion. It’s seems touch enabled platform is getting more popular. Most control like ReOrderlist, slider and etc still does not support touch screen. Hopes to see it soon enough. Thanks for great works.
This is a great idea! Adding touch support to the Ajax Control Toolkit would be a nice addition. Thanks for the feedback.
Will the source code be available for this release? I like to get in there and poke around to get a better grasp on the hows and whys.
@Will – yes, absolutely. We are working on updating the source code tonight. I am hoping that we’ll get the source code all updated in a day or so — so please check back at CodePlex at the end of the week.
Hi stephen,
I just got some valuable information from your site and it helps me alot,thanks for that and can i get some examples regarding how to use this pie chart controls.