Revisiting Charting with ASP.NET and LINQ

Once upon a time I wrote an article titled “Charting with ASP.NET and LINQ”. At the time I used a combination of WebForms, WCF, the Microsoft AJAX libraries, and the Microsoft chart control. I had some time to revisit the topic recently and rewrote the sample application using ASP.NET MVC and jQuery. You can download the sample here.

The idea behind the sample is to present a “dashboard” full of charts. I’ve worked on a few dashboards over the years, and they are always notoriously difficult to optimize without aggressive caching and asynchrony. In this sample the view drops placeholder images with enough information for JavaScript to come along and request each chart asynchronously. The result is a page that loads quickly and then fills with information over time.

There are a few interesting pieces to compare and contrast in the sample. We’ll look at them over the coming days.