Irrespective of if your working on some kind of company extranet or the admin side of a public facing site, one thing that will make you're clients go ooooooo and love your work is the inclusion of a funky looking chart. It may not serve any amazing purpose, but as there looking through all the boring text area's and buttons that actually make up the functionality of the site, the inclusion of nice looking chart is going to make them go "oooo that's nice" and like you even more. For those of us working in .NET, thanks' to an update from Microsoft at the end of 2008 it's also something that've very quick an easy to do. Better yet the update was free so the only cost is the time you take to implement it. 

First off if you want to use the chart's and you haven't downloaded them then that's what you need to do. The chart's shipped after .NET 3.5 so there a separate install, .NET 4 however has them included by default. 

• Chart controls for .NET 3.5
• Add on for visual studio 2008
• Chart controls samples

Using the Chart Control

Like I said adding a chart to a page is a quick and easy thing to do. Once you have the Visual Studio add on installed you can also drag and drop everything into place. However I'm going to go into a bit more detail. 

To start your going to need a data source. In this example I'm using a SQL Data Source object for ease of use, in a production environment I heavily recommend against using them as there going to make your code a completely unmanageable mess, instead I would use something like a Entity Data Source. My chart is going to be showing a graph of mobile phone handset popularity so my SQL is simply just returning a table of phone names and how many people use them. 

Code so far: 

Next we need to add a chart, the easiest way to do this is to just drag a chart object onto the page from the toolbox, however if you do want to type it yourself it's not particularly complex. 

First you will need to register the assembly on the page.. 

And then add the chart like so...

Now we're ready to start customizing what type of chart we're going to have and what data it should show from our data source.

To actually show a chart there's two bits of information you have to describe, area's and series'. The first area's is used to define an area for a chart to appear, one interesting thing about the chart control is you aren't limited to just one area. In fact in this example I'm going to have to chart's one showing a pie chart of phone popularity that will quickly show what kind of share each phone has, and then a second bar chart making it more clear the actual numbers people have of each phone. Area's also let you set properties on what the chart is actually going to look like as well. In this instance I'm going to set for both charts to be 3D.

The second bit of information is the Series. This is where you're actually specifying what data is going to be shown in which area and what kind of chart it is (e.g. Pie, Column, Donut etc). My completed code then looks like this...

Depending on your data this should give you something like this...

This is just a simple example of what you can do, but if you download the Chart Samples Project and have a look through there is no end to the possibilities with everything from different styles of charts to adding ajax functionality even with the ability to click of different parts of the carts to trigger events.

Lazy loading isn't a new concept, it's a pattern that been around for a while to improve the performance of your apps by only loading objects when they are going to be used. For example if you have an object that contains a property of a list of customers then you only really need to populate it when you access the property not when the object was initially created, as it may never be used. At the same time though you don't want to be going off to the database every time access the property. So the simple solution is to have another private variable that stores if the customers property is populated or not and then check that in the property's get to determine if the data needs to be loaded or not.

Well now in .NET 4, lazy loading has been built into the framework with System.Lazy. Instead of the above all you need to do now is write something like this...

Lazy<Customers> _customers = new Lazy<Customers>();

What this will do is create you a customers object but only run the constructor when you actually access the objects Value property which will be of type Customers. e.g.

_customers.Value.CustomerData 

It's that simple, but can get even better. The constructor may not be the only thing you want to run when you access the property the first time. In this case you would write something like...

_customers = new Lazy<Customers>(() =>
        {
            // Write any other initialization stuff in here
            return new Customers();
        });

I must point out though while as great as this is, it does have some limitations so you probably won't want to use it in all scenarios.

For more information check out the Lazy initialization page on MSDN

Anyone in Web development knows that they should be testing their products on all browsers including different versions, which presents a problem when your only using the one PC. Programs like Multiple IE aren't great and often you can find yourself trying to fix a problem that doesn't actually exist on the proper version.

The best solution is the have virtual machines running on your own machine, but these take time to set up and most developers tend to have little time to spare as it is. Well thankfully if you want to test Internet Explorer you don't have to set the virtual machine up yourself, just head to the following address and you can download one from Microsoft's site. Save the address as you will have to keep downloading it every 3 months due to them building in a time bomb as it is essentially a free OS.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en

The second option also from Microsoft is Super Preview that is planned to be part of their Expression package. Currently it's only at the Beta stage but it if you enter an address it will give you a side by side comparison of a page in IE 6/7/8, plus its free. The full version when it's ready is meant to have support for all the popular browsers (but then you will have to pay for it to). However it is also limited to just being a preview so as far as testing all your JavaScript functions goes, you still need your virtual machines for that.

Meant for Web 2.0 Apps that use a lot of JavaScript, Doloto will speed up the download time of all the JavaScript by basically removing anything that isn't initially needed and replacing it with stubs. It will then download in the background or wait until it is first called. The result, a seemingly much faster Web App for the user.

For more info have a look at the Doloto page on Microsoft's Research site or head over to the download page on MSDN.