Step by Step installing MS Chart Controls on Visual Studio 2008

Generating wonderful charts in .Net application sometimes can easily get customers blown away. Microsoft purchased some products from Dundas Company about a year and a half ago and implementing theirs charts technology into the products. And from last September they give us the free charting controls (both Web and WinForms) for use in our .NET 3.5 applications.

Step 1: To get start you need to download and install:
Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 and Microsoft Chart Controls Add-on for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.

Step 2: Once you have the installation files downloaded, install MSChart.exe first, as the add-on requires this to be installed. Both are quick installs, and should take no more than a few minutes, so when both have been successfully installed to your machine, you can start up Visual Studio.

Step 3: create a new Web or WinForm Application, and now to get the new control into our toolbox, we can right-click on a blank area of it and select Add Tab. Name it something like MSChart:



Step 4, right-click in the new tab and select Choose Items...



We should then see a dialog box like this:



Step 5: Click the Browse button and navigate to the Program Files\Microsoft Chart Controls\Assemblies folder. Here you want to add both the Windows.Form and the Web DLLs. Once they're added, they will be available to select in the list box:



So once they're added, and checked, they should be available in our toolbox:



After you’ve done the configuration, I strongly recommend you to download the Samples Environment for Microsoft Chart Controls from Microsoft and read the docs: Microsoft Chart Controls for .NET Framework Documentation.

In my next post, I will write a quick demo on how to implement MSChart in a Windows Form Application to display a graph from database data.