Friday, July 10, 2009

Treemap’ing in Silverlight – Treemap control added to the Silverlight Toolkit (available in Experimental Quality Band)

marlat's blog - TreeMap control comes to Silverlight Toolkit

“Since this is my first post after over one month break I own an explanation. I have two excuses: one is of course vacations and the other one is really nice. Together with the colleagues of mine, I had the pleasure to work on a new control – TreeMap - that is included in the next release of Silverlight Toolkit.

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I perceive the introduction of this control as especially important because it enables you to easily visualize more than one dimensional, correlated data in a way that is attractive and understandable to a user without any statistician or mathematical background.

…”

CodePlexSilverlight Toolkit

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I’ve been a fan of using treemaps to help visualize data for years. Since I first saw it used in WinDirStat years ago and then in NDepend, treemaps just click for me. The way they provide so much information in a compact yet easy to understand form hooked me.

The problem has been that there have been few implementations to date (or few free/cheap/reasonably priced ones). Luckily for me that tide seems to be changing. In the past few months I’ve seen a marked uptick in the number of treemap controls coming online, from commercial third parties, like Infragistics, to a number of OSS projects, like Pixel in Gene - A SilverLight TreeMap control & GPDE Team Blog - Silverlight Treemap Control.

With the inclusion of a treemap control in the Silverlight Toolkit, is 2009 the year treemaps go mainstream?

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Infragistics NetAdvantage Select 2008 Volume 3 released today
AddressOf.com - MS Research TreeMap.Net

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