Project 31-A

Introduction The project required the need to put the visual pie chart on a web page on the client and in a Pdf file created on the server. I eventually choose to use a Telerik Kendo DataViz Chart control on the client, and use a PNG file on the server for the Pdf file. This blog post will explain the process and code to convert the client-side pie chart Svg data to a Png file, and provide a download to the working code. Prerequisites You need to have a trial version of the Telerik Kendo library installed in order to make the sample code work. You also need InkScape installed. InkScape is the application that does the actual conversion. You will need to change the Web.config appSetting of “ExeDirectoryForInkscape” to represent your own installation location. Any SVG Data Will Work The pie chart was created using the Telerik Kendo DataViz chart control. While I name a specific control, as long as you have access to the SVG data, the same conversion process on the server will...

This last week I attended “Information Making Sense of the Deluge” hosted by The Economist (on my own dime and time). http://ideas.economist.com/event/information Available on line at http://fora.tv/conference/ideas_economy_information   First , this was the best conference that I have attended in at least 20 years… They had a strict “No Death by PowerPoint” policy. Less than 300 participants and 60 speakers. Talks and panel discussions were typically just 10 – 20 minutes each. A massive number of awesome speakers. Since we often present data, I should point folks to the works of Edward Tufte a Yale Emeritus Professor who is renowned for his data visualization and information design (see http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ -- he is giving one-day courses in Seattle on the 20 th and 21 st of June). He has written publications on some of the problems with PowerPoints. These URLs will show some of his data visualizations: Bing Images Goog...

In my current development project, my MVVM pivot app needed to create a pie chart from a collection of objects. I read David Anson’s ( @DavidAns ) blog about using Charts in Windows Phone 7 (WP7) development. His example uses a detailed Resource Dictionary for the style of the chart. I’m so new to Silverlight that the XAML markup of David’s example tripped me up. This blog post is for other newbies trying to rework static resources into dynamic binding. In Silverlight, static resources are those that are already defined, hence static. This is great for a known set or for working in the Visual Studio Design-time environment. Dynamic resources can only be viewed in the runtime environment where they can also be changed. In this article, I’m using the Silverlight Toolkit, found here . A chart is a parent with child nodes of legend and pieseries. Since the Chart is a parent with several children, I wasn’t sure where to bind my collection of dynamic objects which would determine t...