Hey everyone!

Even though the release of SciChart WPF v4.2 is barely a day old(!) we are already hard at work on v4.3, where we intend to add some new features for SciChart WPF 3D Charts as well as several 2D Chart features. We want to get some information from you, our userbase, as to what requirements are most important to you. We also need to ask you a few questions about how you would expect correct usage of the 3D Chart.

Features Planned for v4.3

We are planning the following features for v4.3 of SciChart WPF and we need your feedback on them. Some questions and explanation are found below.

1. SC3D-218 Support for contours on 3D Surface Mesh charts
2. SC3D-336 Support for nulls (transparent cells) or override cell colours on 3D Surface Mesh charts
3. SC3D-338 Support for Waterfall 3D Charts
4. SC3D-337 Possibly: Support for non-uniform mesh sizes (pending feasibility)
5. SC3D-326 Possibly: Virtualization of Surface Mesh where size exceeds 4096*4096 (pending feasibilty)

SC3D-218 Contours on Meshes

We can add contours on surface plots quite easily. Something like this:

This is quite easy to do, but we would like to know from you if (a) it is important, (b) you need to be able to configure the contour colours dynamically (per contour, as opposed to one colour for all), (c) whether you have any special requirements for placing contours, or if you would like SciChart to choose and (d) any other comments or suggestions for the API as we build it.

Can you contact us if this feature is important to you? Your input into the requirements would be greatly appreciated.

SC3D-336 Support for Nulls in Surface Meshes

A number of users have asked for nulls (transparent cells) in surface meshes. This sounds easy on the surface, but it isn’t … Nevertheless we want to deliver it. We do have some questions though.

Given a surface mesh with 8×8 data values, we end up with something like this (below). The data-points are shown by orange dots. The cells are the squares next to the dots.

8×8 Surface Mesh. Data-values are marked as orange points

As you can see, cell colour is specified by interpolating the four points surrounding a cell. For example, the cell in the top right has a data-value of Y=1 so it should be red, but it isn’t, it’s yellow, because it has two other edges which are only at Y=0.5.

Now if a user wants to specify a cell as transparent, for example the cell at X=1, Z=6, them you end up with this:

When one data-point is null at X=1,Z=6, four cells become transparent.

Now this obviously isn’t ideal. We thought about how to solve this.

We could allow you to specify a separate texture for the mask to ‘null’ certain cells, however you will notice that there are 8×8 data-points in the mesh, but only 7×7 cells, so the texture size doesn’t actually match the data size. This would allow you to mask out certain cells but it would also give you a clunky API and raise questions of accuracy because of the mismatch of sizes.

Another way is we could change how we are drawing the cell textures. We could offset the texture so that each square in the texture surrounds the data-point, for example:

Proposed solution: offsetting cell positions so the centre of the cell is over the data-point

This would be a nice solution except it raises two problems.

1. At the edges you get half a cell. Might look wierd.
2. The wireframe position (which goes through the data-points) no longer matches the cell edges. When SurfaceMeshRenderableSeries3D.MeshPaletteMode is HeightMapInterpolated, but might look odd when SurfaceMeshRenderableSeries3D.MeshPaletteMode is HeightMapSolidCells.

We invite your comment/feedback on this proposed solution and whether it seems correct. It is very important to us that our scientific WPF Charts are both intuitive and accurate.

SC3D-337 Uneven Spacing of Surface Mesh Data-Points

Several users have requested that we allow uneven spacing of surface mesh data-points. However, we have a question. Which sort of spacing are you expecting, (A) or (B)?

(A) Uneven spacing of mesh points with each point in a row, column the same as the other points

(B) Uneven spacing of mesh points with decoupled placement of points

SC3D-338 Waterfall Charts 3D

In SciChart WPF v4.3 we intend to add Waterfall Charts 3D. For clarification, we intend to create a hardware-accelerated version of our WPF Waterfall Chart Example using SciChart3D:

The SciChart WPF Waterfall Chart is simulated using 2D Charts

If we do this, we will likely bind it to our UniformGridDataSeries3D type. This means the data-source will be a 2-dimensional Double[][] array of Y-values only. But what sort of requirements do you need for this chart type? Do you need for example:

• To be able to space values in X unevenly or will the spacing be uniform?
• To have different numbers of points on each ‘slice’ or the same point count on all slices?
• Do you need to scroll left/right as if this were many slices of a timeseries?

We’re assuming you need realtime performance & being able to scroll in the Z-direction (time) …

SC3D-326 Virtualization of Large Surfaces

The current limit for the size of the 3D Surface Mesh chart is limited by the maximum texture size on your GPU, which in most cases is 4096*4096 and on some GPUs is larger, up to 16k * 16k.

Some customers have contacted us and asked for larger surface sizes, but we would just like to know how many so that we can prioritise this complex piece of work.

Finally..

Those are all the questions we have about SciChart 3D Surface Mesh for now. If you are a current customer of SciChart WPF 3D, or you are considering to purchase this software, please get in contact with your feedback. It is extremely valuable that we build software that you actually want to use and meets your requirements!

Best regards,
[SciChart Team]

The post Requirements for 3D Surface Mesh Charts appeared first on WPF Charts, iOS and Android Charts | SciChart.

We’ve been talking about it for a while, but SciChart for Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS are nearly here!

We are hoping to be releasing a BETA of these two control libraries at the end of the year. These will be a binding library (wrapper) around our existing iOS Charts & Android Chart controls, so you will soon be able to build applications either natively using XCode or Android Studio, or using Microsoft tools (Visual Studio, Xamarin Studio, and Visual Studio for Mac).

Read more about our mobile strategy, plus what the future holds for SciChart below:

Why Xamarin?

SciChart Android running inside Xamarin Studio + Android Emulator on a Mac

At SciChart we made the strategic decision in January 2015 to begin to port to mobile platforms iOS & Android, because we felt that our fast, high-performance WPF charting controls were a natural fit for mobile devices where performance is required in real-time scientific or financial charting apps. It has been a long journey, but in July of 2016 we released SciChart iOS & SciChart Android v1. Since then we have released a number of minor updates, and our mobile chart controls are already being used by a number of companies to create some amazing applications with incredible performance.

However, from the first moment we announced SciChart for iOS / Android in 2015 we have had requests for Xamarin. We were reluctant at first because of the pricing of Xamarin in 2015, however, Microsoft has since acquired Xamarin and made it free to all, so there is no longer a cost barrier to use this incredible technology for developing mobile apps. As a result, we have accelerated our mobile development and Xamarin binding libraries so that we could bring SciChart to mobile as well as desktop platforms using Microsoft tooling.

Microsoft is Betting on Xamarin

SciChart iOS Running inside Xamarin Studio+ iOS Emulator on OSX

Since we started working with Xamarin in April 2016, we have seen a huge amount of change in these toolsets. Microsoft is working hard to update the platforms, staying current with the latest XCode version, the latest Android SDKs and fixing bugs. We have seen so much change that we actually had to re-write our binding libraries once just to cater for them!

What we see is Microsoft is confident in the future success of Xamarin, are working very actively on it, so we are as well. We are committed to invest in this platform. What’s more, it ties in with what we already do: we already make a very successful 2D & 3D chart control on WPF.

Our Strategy in 2016-2017

SciChart Android running in VS2015 with Xamarin.Android and the Android Emulator on Windows

We intend to BETA our 2D Chart Control libraries for Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS at the end of the year, with a full release in Q1 of 2017. Our offering will include 2D Charts, and we intend to port over everything that we’re doing in WPF to the Xamarin as well as native iOS/Android platforms.

We intend to port over 3D Charts to mobile. Our WPF 3D Charting engine is mostly written in C++, and we deliberately made it cross platform so it will work on iOS & Android.

We intend to make our iOS components available for Mac Desktop (OSX) use. The change between Objective-C on iOS & Mac Desktop is minimal, so we can get an extra platform with much of the code reused. Also Xamarin.Mac allows development for Mac desktop. Bonus!

We also intend to continue to expand our WPF team – our WPF business is actually growing – not shrinking as the pundits will have you think. We continue to see a lot of life in this platform, which is if we’re honest, our first love in programming

Watch this space

If you want to hear more about what we’re doing, sign up to one of our newsletters. You can do this by going to a landing page (for any platform) and giving us your name and email. Any of them will work, such as this one on iOS:

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER

When we release you will be notified. In the meantime, if you have any feedback, or want to discuss our mobile roadmap, please get in touch!

Best regards,
[SciChart Team]

The post Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android Support coming soon! appeared first on WPF Charts, iOS and Android Charts | SciChart.

Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS enables development of SciChart mobile apps in Visual Studio!

We’ve published what is a very very early Alpha version of the SciChart iOS & Android Xamarin Bindings to our NuGet feed and Github today. These are binding libraries (thin wrappers) around our existing SciChart iOS & Android Native Chart Components.

You can clone the repository for the SciChart Xamarin Examples here. This builds in Visual Studio 2015 with Xamarin 10.3. Also, you can get the NuGet packages for SciChart.iOS, SciChart.Android from our SciChart official NuGet Feed.

SciChart Xamarin Examples are open source on Github

SciChart official NuGet Feed

Currently the Android examples are completed and working, iOS Examples are a work in progress. The SciChart.iOS and SciChart.Android Xamarin DLLs are v2.0 Alpha. Full release will be expected in January as we aim to release SciChart iOS & Android v2.0 at the same time.

To build the examples, you will need Visual Studio 2015 and Xamarin 10.3.

• For Android, you will need to setup the development environments for Android SDK and NDK as per our documentation, with Java SDK 8.
• For iOS, you will need a real Mac OSX machine to act as a build agent. XCode 8.2 and Xamarin Studio with Xamarin.iOS is required on the Mac to build and deploy SciChart.iOS.

Full dev setup instructions coming soon!

Next week we expect to add a host of iOS Chart examples, and please be advised the API is still in flux as we unify iOS & Android and ensure the two platforms have similar APIs.

More coming soon!

Best regards,
[SciChart Team]

The post SciChart Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android Bindings ALPHA appeared first on WPF Charts, iOS and Android Charts | SciChart.

Even during holidays our team can’t stop improving our WPF charts. We are pleased to announce that SciChart WPF v4.2.1 has now been released!

This release includes some critical bug fixes, including two memory leaks in SciChart 3D, as well as some minor features requested by our users over the past few weeks.

It is strongly advised for users of SciChart v4.x to upgrade to this version, which is a drop-in replacement.

SciChart WPF Task Tracker now Public

If you have a moment you can take a look at our Issue Tracker board showing the status of SciChart WPF. Our Issue Tracker is now public and has a new look. You can browse the status of sprints, tasks and bugs that you have reported.

Have a look below to see what’s in the release.

What’s New in v4.2.1?

Minor edits: 

• Added PointLineRenderableSeries3D.IsAntialiased property;
• Added missing TemplateParts descriptions for annotation types;   
• Updated CrosshairLinesSceneEntity 3D to use antialiasing by default;
• Added new ResamplingMode.MinOrMax;
  • Performs (Max) when points above zero, (Min) when points below zero, and MinMax when points span zero;
  • Reduces clutter on the chart for line series;
  • Allows correct output for Mountain and Column when (Max) mode is used and points span zero;   
• Added GetSize and GetFontFace to TSRFont;
• Modified Equals method for TextureKey class, so it compare Opacity. It’s needed for dynamic Opacity changing;
• Added new Dependency Property “Opacity” for IRenderableSeries;
• Updated RubberBandXyZoomModifier.PerformZoom to public virtual so that users can override it;
• Made DefaultEntityIdProvider.GetEntityId() virtual so that users can override it.

Fixed a couple of things too:

• SC3D-355 Fixed AccessViolationException on shutdown of an application with SciChart3D
• SC3D-347 Fixed Native memory leak in SciChart3D after open/close window which contains a 3D Chart.
• Fixed TSRFont leak in SCRTAxisCubeEntity.cpp;
• SC-3797 Fixed Reported great decrease in performance of DataPointSelectionModifier;
• SC3D-357 Fixed Selection always selects the last point;
• SC-3548 Fixed FastColumnRenderableSeries does not display negative data once resampled;
• SC-3796 Fixed rotated heatmap not drawing in hq, hs and xaml renders;
• SC3D-349 Fixed Performance Decrease for PointLineRenderableSeries3D and SciChart3D charts from v4.1.1 to v4.2.0;
• SC-3787 Fixed Tooltips to work with specific data mapping in Heatmap;  
• SC-3795 Fixed the Setting Opacity to work well for RenderableSeries
• Fixed Viewport3D removes RootEntity as well as disposes;
• SC3D-346 Fixed TextSceneEntity / Font3D performance is terrible when 1,000 scene entities.
• SC-3794 Fixed MaximumMeshID Exceeded when greater than 1,000 TextSceneEntitiy objects in the scene
• SC-3784 Fixed SelectedPointMarker property was missed in BaseRenderableSeriesViewModel;
• SC-3605 Fixed AnnotationCreation modify to allow continuous usage;
• SC-3698 Fixed AxisMarkerAnnotation wrong mouse cursor;   
• SC-3777 Fixed the Deviations from VisibleRangeLimit during zooming/ZoomExtents;
• SC-3783 Fixed SciChartOverview update when SciStockChart & SciChartOverview is hidden;
• Fixed hardcoded gaps in pie/donut charts and added some properties for it;
• SC-3664 Fixed Disappearing HorizontalLine on the top edge;
• SC-3664 Fixed Disappearing VerticalLine near the edge;   
• Fixed SeriesSelectionModifier issue;
• Fixed compilation error in TestSuite;
• Fixed Heatmap tooltip getting Z-value if maping is flipped;   
• Fixed SC-3798 RolloverModifier when it shows many tooltips in SciChart Trader example;
• Fixed pie/donut selection event args;
• SC-3801 Fixed the issue when AutoRange didn’t work for SurfaceMeshes;
• Fixed a bug where font change only occurred on XAxis;
• Fixed a bug where fonts were recreated every frame, causing slowdown;
• Fixed issue where updating of Line/Tick line styles in AxisBase3D.ToAxisDescriptor caused an infinite redraw of the chart;

Where to get it?!

You can get all the SciChart Releases from the www.scichart.com/downloads page. If you haven’t created an account with SciChart.com yet, please do. You will need to in order to access the downloads.

If you are a customer of SciChart you can also access our binaries via our NuGet feed as well as Github (for source-code customers).

Best regards,
[SciChart Team]

The post SciChart WPF v4.2.1 Buid 9358 Released! appeared first on WPF Charts, iOS and Android Charts | SciChart.

Happy New Year everyone!

I hope you had a wonderful break over the past few weeks and enjoyed ringing in the new year!

Over the holidays we saw this announcement on Joel Spolsky’s twitter feed.

Actually, it’s not that recent but it’s news to us! So we headed over to Stackoverflow Documentation and tried to request adding the tag SciChart. Obviously it would be a great boon for us to have some examples on StackOverflow to assist us with search rankings, as well as give our current & prospective users a platform to share code examples. However, it didn’t work out …

Oh dear … The SciChart Tag on stack overflow only has about 30 questions, and apparently, we need 500 to become eligible for StackOverflow documentation.

Now that should be easy, right? We have somewhere close to 1,600 questions on our Forums and several thousand support tickets, so there are enough users and enough questions!

So here’s the thing. Would you consider asking some questions on StackOverflow for us so we can reach our goal of 500? 

It’s actually very easy to do. Next time you have a question about SciChart, would you head over to stackoverflow.com/questions/ask and create a question tagged with SciChart?

Our team gets notified when a new SciChart question appears, so we will answer! If not, you can always give us a poke on the support desk or live chat

Thank you in advance. We really appreciate your advocacy and continued support of SciChart.

Thanks and regards,
Andrew
[SciChart Team]

The post Help SciChart to get on StackOverflow Documentation! appeared first on WPF Charts, iOS and Android Charts | SciChart.

We are pleased to announce that SciChart iOS SDK v1.2.3 982 has now been released! Please see below for the list of improvements / features added and bugs fixed.

If you are using SciChart iOS v1.x then this update is a drop-in replacement.

What’s New in SciChart iOS v1.2.3 982?

New Features

• Added transparency for Surface’s background;
• Added CustomRenderableSeries;
• Added method for reattaching view to surface;

Bugs Fixed

• Fixed isEnabled option for annotations;
• Fixed annotations and modifier group gestures handling;
• Fixed gradient brushes copying;
• Fixed mountain renderable series: added calculating Y range.

Where to get SciChart Downloads?

You can get the SciChart iOS SDK v1.2.0 from the Downloads page. Source code customers can also get-latest from our Github repository.

GET SCICHART IOS v1.2.3

What’s coming soon?

We have been quite about our roadmap but we estimate that we are a few weeks away from a major release of SciChart iOS & Android: v2.0. This will add a number of enhancements, including new chart types, new features and support for Xamarin applications. More info to be announced soon!

Best regards,

The post SciChart iOS v1.2.3 982 Released appeared first on WPF Charts, iOS and Android Charts | SciChart.

We are pleased to announce that SciChart Android SDK v1.2.1 1540 has now been released! We had minor bug fixes done and improved our documentation a lot, please see below for the list of changes.

If you are using SciChart Android v1.x then this update is a drop-in replacement.

What’s New in SciChart Android v1.2.1 1540?

Documentation updates:

• A set of articles on annotations;
• Articles on cursor and tooltip modifiers;
• And a set of articles on chart modifiers.

Fixed:

• Fixed SC_DROID-319 issue with line annotations, that overlaped the whole chart when background was set;
• Fixed SC_DROID-328 issue that prevents the incorrect annotation placement;
• Fixed SC_DROID-327 safeRemove of annotation was added;
• Fixed the issue with the Charting project;
• Fixed SC_DROID-326 script to allow passing of sdkMinVersion to Gradle from command line via project parameters.

Where to get SciChart Downloads?

You can get the SciChart Android SDK v1.2.1.1540 from the Downloads page. Source code customers can also get-latest from our Github repository.

GET SCICHART Android v1.2.1.1540

What’s coming soon?

We have been quite about our roadmap but we estimate that we are a few weeks away from a major release of SciChart iOS & Android: v2.0. This will add a number of enhancements, including new chart types, new features and support for Xamarin applications. More info to be announced soon!

Best regards,

The post SciChart Android v1.2.1 1540 Released appeared first on WPF Charts, iOS and Android Charts | SciChart.

A few months ago we made the decision to make our Issue Tracker / Bug Tracker boards public for the iOS & Android projects. Well, we have now made them public also for the WPF projects, as well as given our issue tracker a new look! Have a glance at the SciChart Issue Tracker now.

You can see the progress we have done so far as well as the features we are working on and have planned for our releases on the SciChart WPF v5 Task Board, the SciChart iOS v2.0 Task Board and the SciChart Android v2.0 Task Board

We have Agile boards for each of our projects

We have one Agile board for each of our projects (SciChart WPF, SciChart iOS and SciChart Android), where we organize it into versions and we use a Kanban or Lean style for delivering our projects. Our team found it works more efficiently for us than working in sprints. It allows us stay flexible and productive at same time.

Therefore for each version or release we categorize our work by features (they are swim lines on the board). Features are further divided into tasks. You can choose any release version from the dropdown menu and see what we have already done or are currently working on!

You can track the status of the bugs you have reported yourself!

If you want to report a bug please e-mail us at 
In your e-mail please include:

• Steps to reproduce
• Screentshots and
• Code samples

Be advised your bug will be public, so do not include any proprietary information in it!

The way we set our work helps us to reply to your support requests within a day. We are excited to see your ideas, feedback or new features requests at our support desk as well. Please talk to us, we are happy to hear your feedback!

We are really excited about the enhancements we have planned, including new chart types, new features for all our platorms, including WPF Charts, iOS Charts, Android Charts, and soon, Xamarin Charts. Stay on track!

Best regards,
Julia
[SciChart Team]

The post Our Issue Tracker has a new look! appeared first on WPF Charts, iOS and Android Charts | SciChart.

SciChart now features an optional DirectX10 based renderer. This is currently included as an add-on to the SciChart High Performance WPF Charts library. For more info about the renderer plugins that SciChart provides, please see the articles High Quality vs. High Speed vs. DirectX Renderer Plugins as well as How Fast is SciChart’s DirectX WPF Chart.

Once we move away from the happy, safe world of .NET and into unmanaged code, we need to take a few extra steps to ensure compatibility! This post aims to address compatibility issues with using the Direct3D10RenderSurface, a premium add-on to SciChart High Performance WPF Charts.

Direct3D10RenderSurface System Requirements

Operating System Requirements

The SciChart Direct3D10RenderSurface requires Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 or higher.

Hardware Requirements

The SciChart Direct3D10RenderSurface requires a DirectX10 compatible GPU.

You can check the DirectX version your GPU supports by running the DXDiag.exe application, found under your windows start menu.

Prerequisites

The SciChart Direct3D10Renderer has a dependency on D3DX9_43.dll and D3DX10_43.dll.

D3DX9 and 10 are extensions to DirectX and are not installed with Windows as standard.

Deploying your SciChart Application with the Direct3D10RenderSurface

Developer PCs and End-User PCs have the same system requirements to run the SciChart DirectX Renderer. To ensure your SciChart application can use the Direct3D10RenderSurface wherever available, and downgrade to software renderer when not available, please follow these steps:

1. Enable the DirectX Renderer

Follow the example at Easy Fallback from DirectX to Software Rendering without code behind:

<SciChartSurface DirectXHelper.TryApplyDirectXRenderer="True">

...
</SciChartSurface>

2. Distribute SharpDX 2.6.2 with your Application

The Direct3D10RenderSurface also has a dependency on SharpDX v2.6.3 (a Managed Wrapper for DirectX, licensed under the MIT License).

Please make sure the following DLLs are in your output directory (where your application exe resides) when deploying applications with DirectX. SharpDX is also available on NuGet.

• SharpDX.D3DCompiler.dll (part of SharpDX v2.6.3)
• SharpDX.Direct3D9.dll
• SharpDX.Direct3D10.dll
• SharpDX.dll
• SharpDX.DXGI.dll

3. Ensure the DirectX Runtime is installed on End-User PCs

All End-User PCs must have the DirectX Runtime installed. The package is included in the SciChart v3.2.4 or later installation directory at %InstallDir%\Prerequisites\DirectX.

You will need to include the DirectX Prerequisites and install DXSetup.exe on end-user PCs when you deploy your application*. To silently install the DirectX Runtime on end-user PC’s, please run the following command line in your application deployment process:

EXEC DXSetup.exe /silent

*Microsoft permits you to redistribute the above files with your end-user applications royalty free. The licensing terms for DXSetup can be found in the licensing agreement of the DirectX End-User Runtimes (June 2010)

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How can I check at runtime if the DirectX renderer is supported on my PC?

A: You can use the Direct3D10CompatibilityHelper class!

Usage:

/// <summary>
/// A helper class which can be used to detect if the Direct3D10 enhancements to SciChart can run on the current hardware & operating system
/// </summary>
public static class Direct3D10CompatibilityHelper
{
   /// <summary>
   /// Supported operating systems include Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, 8.1 and up. Windows XP, 2000, 2003 are not supported.
   /// </summary>
   public static bool IsSupportedOperatingSystem { get; }

   /// <summary>
   /// Determines if the DirectX10 Runtime Libraries can be found in the C:\Windows\System32 and C:\Windows\SysWow64 folders. If the libraries are not present, we recommend
   /// installing the DirectX Runtime from %SciChart Install Dir%/Prerequisites/DirectX.
   /// This installs platform specific libraries (x86, x64) and SciChart dynamically chooses the correct DirectX version at runtime
   /// </summary>
   public static bool HasDirectX10RuntimeInstalled { get; }

   /// <summary>
   /// Determines if the current GPU supports DirectX10 or later
   /// </summary>
   public static bool HasDirectX10CapableGpu { get; }

   /// <summary>
   /// Determines if the current hardware & software configuration fully supports DirectX10 or later
   /// </summary>
   public static bool SupportsDirectX10 { get { return IsSupportedOperatingSystem && HasDirectX10RuntimeInstalled && HasDirectX10CapableGpu; } }
}

Q: Do I have to install the DirectX Runtime on every End-User PC?

A: SciChart actually only requires D3DX9_43.dll and D3DX10_43.dll

The way to deploy them is by including DXSetup.exe and related files (found in the %SciChartInstallDir%\Prerequisites\DirectX folder) with your application deployment. You can run DXSetup on end-user PCs by calling the command line

EXEC DXSetup.exe /silent

Please note: The licensing terms for the DirectX Runtime restrict you from packaging or embedding the required DLLs with your application, but allows distributing DXSetup and associated files in the %SciChartInstallDir%/Prerequisites/DirectX folder. You must run the DXSetup installer on end-user PCs to remain compliant with Microsofts terms.

Q: Does the DirectX Renderer Work over Remote Desktop?

A: We use D3DImage, which is a Microsoft control that allows sharing of DirectX content with WPF, avoiding airspace issues and allowing fast interop between WPF’s DirectX9 and DirectX10 rendering.

Unfortunately D3DImage has a bug, a nasty one. It won’t work over remote desktop if your application is .NET4.0! It will work over Remote Desktop on .NET4.5 and above.

Since SciChart v4 we have developed a workaround where SciChart DirectX will now work over remote desktop. This is automatic and no changes need to be applied to your code.

Q: I am experiencing flicker with DirectX in my application

Please see this FAQ which talks about how to resolve the problem of Flickering Charts in SciChart.

Q: How much faster is the DirectX Renderer than the Software Renderer?

A: The answer will depend on your exact hardware, software configuration and what you are doing with the chart. In our tests we found the DirectX Renderer to be on average 3.92x faster than the High Speed software renderer, and with superior visual quality (sub-pixel antialiasing).

Not bad for a drop-in upgrade!

Got Feedback?

DirectX is a big part of our future, so we want to make this work for you. If you experience compatibility issues or other problems using the DirectX renderer, then please do get in contact with your feedback. We would love to be of assistance.

The post DirectX WPF Chart Compatibility appeared first on WPF Charts, iOS and Android Charts | SciChart.

We wanted to take a moment to thank our customers and supporters for the past year, as well as give you feedback on where we have been, and are planning to go as a business. In the past year SciChart has experienced 60% year on year growth, and we have some exciting plans for the future. Read on to find out more about SciChart – Annual Report and Roadmap – for 2016/2017.

SciChart: From Side Project to >$1m Revenue

SciChart began as a side project. Invented by one person, in spare time, pretty much in a bedroom! With no debt, or investors, SciChart began making High Performance WPF Chart components in early 2012. We created a Limited Company, and setup easy online payments with FastSpring, and our first customer bought online with a credit card. We still remember how shocked we were when the sales notification came through by email! We scrambled to issue the first license certificate – manually. That customer is still with us 5 years later (we also have a system to issue licenses now:))

SciChart: Year on Year growth in Licenses

In the first year (2012), SciChart sold a handful of licenses – 141 to be precise. We felt like our first version was quite frankly, terrible! It was a completely new WPF Charting library, promising to deliver high performance, interactive charts. Although it was new, and lacking in features, at the time it beat all known competitors in speed and performance, and then came a close second in a performance test with a rival shortly after our v1 release. This caused instant interest in what we had done. People began contacting us and asking for new features! SciChart v1 was new to the WPF Charting market, but we worked hard, listened to customer feedback and the chart library went through several iterations to quickly add new features that were requested by users in it’s first year. We are extremely grateful to our early adopters, who took a chance on us in those early years. Thank you!

SciChart: Cumulative Sum of Licenses/Users

In the second year (2013), SciChart v2 was released, and we saw growth of 150% to 342 licenses/year. In year 3 (2014), we released version 3 of our High Performance WPF Charts, and we saw 117% growth to 742 licenses/year, and in year 4 (2015), a further 33% growth to 979 licenses sold. This brings us to year 5 (2016). In this year we released SciChart v4, and SciChart WPF 3D which saw a further 15% growth in licenses with a total of 1,118 licenses sold in the last fiscal year.

At the time of writing, there are currently a running total of 3,400 developer licenses in the field for SciChart. We don’t know how many end-users are being served by this many developer licenses, however it is possible, that tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, or maybe even millions(!) of people have seen or used a SciChart chart in an end-user application. We would love to know, so if you did want to give us feedback on where you are using SciChart and how many end-users you have, we would appreciate it!

In the days of Facebook and SnapChat, 3,400 licenses might not seem like a lot of users, but bear in mind we are talking about a niche, high value software product. SciChart isn’t a $0.99 app, nor a mass market application like Microsoft Word. It’s a niche product with a high value (ranging from $629 for a single license without support to $25,490 for a 2D+3D Charts site-license including tech support and source-code), so these sort of numbers for a small business in this field are very impressive.

60% Year on Year Growth in 2016

SciChart: Year on year Growth in gross revenue

In terms of revenue the figures are also looking strong, as average sale price has increased in 2016 with the advent of SciChart WPF 3D. In 2016 SciChart experienced a 49% increase in gross sales. That coupled with currency tailwinds, SciChart was able to achieve an impressive 60% year on year growth in gross, FX adjusted revenue in the fiscal year 2016.

At the end of the year there was just short of a running total of $3M USD of licensing sales for all time for SciChart, with over a third of the total all-time sales for SciChart occurring in 2016 alone.

We predict growth to continue in the coming year, and using a simple linear regression forecast for new and repeat business, we predict a modest growth of 25-30% in 2017. We did have currencies in our favour in 2016 following the UK EU Referendum and we don’t anticipate the same happening again.

It should be pointed out that even no-growth would be a good result. We’re living within our means and intend to be around for a while yet! We love what we do and enjoy making high quality chart components. We are re-investing in making them even better in 2017 and hope you enjoy using our software as much as we enjoy making it.

Breakdown by Platform

In the past year we have made a step to expand into iOS Charts & Android Charts. Our aim is to produce high-quality, realtime 2D & 3D Charts on the the WPF platform as well as mobile platforms, as well as Xamarin Charts as other hybrid frameworks. This is an effort to diversify and essentially ‘future proof’ our company.

Below you can see the breakdown of sales by platform for SciChart. In 2015 our sales were predominantly made up of WPF 2D Charts. In 2016, SciChart’ WPF 3D Charts have made a considerable impact on sales, and the new 3D Charting product was a runaway success throughout the past year. iOS & Android platforms were released in June/July of 2016, there has been a small, but significant uptake of early adopters for our charts on these mobile platforms.

Using a forecasting model we hope iOS & Android chart sales will grow significantly in 2017 as we introduce v2.0 of our mobile charts, as well as Xamarin Charts Bindings support. However, our business will be predominantly Windows-based for the time being. As a result we have and will be committed to invest the majority of profits into development for WPF Charts (Windows) in order to support our still growing user-base on this platform.

We are even considering to expand SciChart Windows to cover WinForms – I know that seems like a step backwards, but it seems like this platform is still very popular. Also UWP, which is more forward looking. Microsoft certainly seems to be investing in it. We would be interested to hear from customers who are looking for either of these two platforms, and whether they would influence buying decisions were we to build them.

Profitable and Lean

The company – SciChart Ltd – is operated as a bootstrapped ‘lean startup’, meaning, it has no debt, no investors, other than the founders, and re-invests a proportion of profits. The company has been in profit every year since 2012 and we have carefully expanded with minimal overheads and risk. Right now we have a team of 12 developers, these are split across platforms WPF (7), iOS (3) and Android (2) as well as a handful of full or part-time staff for graphic design, sales and systems management. We have almost doubled our team size in the past year. We don’t have a single centralised office – our team is distributed. While we are headquartered in London, UK, we are embracing the modern world by utilising high speed internet communications to allow our team to work remotely. This enables us to be flexible, productive and above all – agile – in a rapidly changing world.

We are as surprised as you are to see SciChart to grow from a side-project into a real small enterprise, starting with one part-time staff member, now with 14 full & part time staff, with customers in over forty countries, and over 3,400 developers worldwide and countless (unknown!) end users using Applications with charts powered by SciChart. It is our aim to grow the company even further and to become the Market Leader in cross-platform native charts over the coming years and we hope to capitalise on our expertise to deliver you better value and a higher level of service in the future.

The Vision for SciChart in 2017 and Beyond

If you want to see where we plan to go with SciChart in the next one or two years, please take a look at our Roadmap: 2017 the Vision for SciChart.

We could keep this secret, and we’ve thought about it. Showing your hand is sometimes not a good idea. What we wanted to do was be transparent to our customer base, who we feel like are partners in our business as they have taken the step to invest in our products and services. We also want to assure both current and future customers that the business is both strong and growing. WPF isn’t going anywhere, and SciChart isn’t going anywhere either!

Seeking Investors or Mentors

Currently SciChart is entirely self-funded, and has no debt or investors, other than the founders. We are considering a limited, private offering of equity capital in order to grow or expand more quickly. If this is an area of your expertise, or, if you would like to mentor us as a tech growth company, or could put us in touch with someone who can, please contact us.

Thank you to our Customers and Supporters

We are lucky to have some of the most loyal, helpful customers in the market. We are always pleased to hear your feedback, your suggestions for the product. We get a lot of referrals and we really appreciate your advocacy and support of SciChart.

Please tell us how we’re doing. We want to recommit to the values of serving you, our customers. If we are doing well, or even if we are not, please contact us and give us your feedback!

Best regards,
Andrew

Managing Director,
SciChart Ltd

The post SciChart Annual Report 2016 appeared first on WPF Charts, iOS and Android Charts | SciChart.

We wanted to take a moment to thank our customers and supporters for the past year, as well as give you feedback on where we have been, and are planning to go as a business. In the past year SciChart has experienced 60% year on year growth, and we have some exciting plans for the future. Read on to find out more about SciChart – The Vision and Roadmap – for 2017 and beyond. 

Investment in the Future

After starting business as a consultancy in 2010 and subsequently developing SciChart, by late 2013 we published a Vision for our company for the future, and in 2014 we published that we were experiencing strong sales growth in the face of declining market share from competitors. We continue to see that growth materialise with strong double digit growth figures (60% year-on-year gross sales in 2016) even in the face of very strong opposition, and as a result, we plan to continue investing in research & development of our charts. It’s time to update you on what we plan to do over the coming years, to ensure that SciChart remains a strong competitor in the market of Realtime & High Performance Charting Components.

Releases Happening in the Next Quarter

SciChart WPF: Strongest Business Area in 2016

SciChart WPF remains our most successful product. Pretty much, 90% of our business comes from the WPF (Windows) platform at the moment, and we anticipate this won’t fall below 80% for at least a year.

As a result WPF is our strongest growth area and where we are investing the most in new technologies and improvements to the SciChart WPF Charting library.

In 2016 we added 3D Charts to our WPF Charting Suite, as well as Ternary Charts, and Pie and Donut Charts. In 2017 we don’t intend to slow down innovation and development of our charting library for WPF, with several new features and chart types out very shortly.

So, below we go through the releases happening in the next quarter for SciChart WPF, iOS and Android.

SciChart WPF v5 (Q1 2017)

SciChart WPF v5 is coming soon. We have done quite a bit of work to improve our already awesome WPF Charts and the next major version (expected in the next 3 months) will include the following:

SciChart WPF Waterfall3D Chart

• Considerably faster realtime 3D Point Cloud / Scatter Chart. Up to 10x faster.
• Considerably faster realtime 3D Point Line Chart. Up to 7x faster.
• New Uniform Heatmap 2D Chart type. Up to 10x faster for the special case of realtime uniform heat maps.
• Support for PaletteProvider in 2D Heatmaps (custom cell colour overriding).
• New 3D Waterfall Chart Type, for viewing area/slices from a 2D array data series, displayed in a 3D Chart. Both realtime and static versions of the chart will be provided.

SciChart WPF DiscontinuousDateTimeAxis

• New DiscontinuousDateTimeAxis type. This is a special axis type, specifically for financial / trading charts, which will allow you to skip ranges (overnight, weekend). It will support series with differing lengths for the first time in trading charts. This opens the possibility of all sorts of indicators and filtering techniques previously impossible with SciChart. It will allow you to use Range, Tick, Volume or Time based bars. It preserves the position on Annotations on time-frame changes. It allows showing/hiding of overnight trading on exchanges with extended trading data.
• New Radar Chart type. This 2D Chart will be added to SciChart WPF to allow displaying radars with customisable axes and selectable series or data-points. This chart type has been built from the ground up using our fast 2D drawing technology and looks great!

SciChart WPF Radar Chart

• DirectX11 support for 2D Charts. No longer will our DirectX plugin use DirectX10, and no longer will it depend on D3DX9_43.dll/D3DX10_43.dll or outdated Microsoft technologies. It will use the latest DirectX11 and require no external dependencies (other than SharpDX), with automatic fallback to software rendering where DirectX is not available.
• Slipstreamed Visual C++ Runtime in the SciChart3D Library. No longer will end-users have to install the Visual C++ 2013 runtime to use SciChart 3D. This will be embedded in our charts.
• We are hoping to add (still working on) nulls or custom cell colouring in 3D Surface Meshs as well as a number of other improvements in the API and charts of SciChart WPF before the version 5 release.

SciChart iOS & Android v2.0 (Q1 2017)

Also expected in the next few months are version 2.0 of our iOS & Android (mobile) Charts. We have done a considerable amount of work to unify the two platforms, resolve differences in API and improve capabilities. The next version of SciChart iOS/Android will include:

New Themes, Logarithmic Axis

Stacked Column, Mountain Charts

• Stacked Mountain series
• Stacked Column Series
• Stacked Mountain (100%) Series
• Stacked Column (100%) Series
• Logarithmic Axis on both iOS+Android Platforms
• Gradient Lines on both iOS+Android Platforms
• Error Bars on both iOS+Android platforms
• Bubble Charts on both iOS+Android platforms
• CustomAnnotation on both iOS+Android platforms
• Dashed Lines on both iOS+Android platforms
• Vertical/HorizontalLineAnnotation on both iOS+Android Platforms
• Inertial Scroll on both platforms.
• ThemeManager support and custom themes on both platforms.

SciChart iOS Dashed Lines, Stacked Column Charts

• Unified API. SCIFastLineRenderableSeries API on iOS will equal com.scichart.FastLineRenderableSeries on Android etc..
• A set of tutorials to get started on both platforms!
• SciChart Xamarin Chart Binding Libraries. These are already published as Alpha and are being worked on as we speak.
• We are researching NativeScript bindings to allow you to use SciChart iOS & Android in this exciting hybrid platform.

We intend to release SciChart iOS & Android v2.0 soon (end Q1 2017), although, Xamarin is really hard. I mean, creating a binding library for our charts has taken nearly half a year, as we fought through several Xamarin bugs, and we weren’t expecting that. Fortunately once the library is created, making applications with the Xamarin components should be easy

Pricing of SciChart WPF v5, iOS & Android v2

We do not anticipate any pricing changes after the release of SciChart WPF v5 and SciChart iOS/Android/Xamarin v2. The prices that we have listed at the SciChart Store will most likely persist beyond release date.

Also, anyone who has a valid support subscription at the time that these new version(s) are released will be upgraded for free to the latest version. That is, WPF customers in-subscription will be able to access SciChart WPF v5, and iOS or Android customers in subscription will also be able to access SciChart iOS, Android 2.0 with Xamarin support for free.

Releases/Events Happening in the Future

So what about the future? What are we going to do after these releases are out the door?

Expanding Consultancy Offerings (Q1-Q4 2017)

Currently, SciChart gains almost 100% of its revenue through licensing sales. This is pretty incredible since most similar-sized component vendors get a significant amount of sales through consultancy work. We don’t really do much consultancy work, but there is no reason why we cannot.

This year (2017) is a year where we plan to expand our consultancy offerrings, with published rates for time & materials work, and we will aim to take on a small number of projects on a contingent basis. If you have an idea for a project, or need our expertise, get in touch, as availability is expected to fill up fast.

3D Charts on Xamarin, iOS & Android Platforms (Q4 2017)

Our WPF 3D Charts are predominantly written in C++, with a cross platform DirectX, OpenGL, OpenGLES Rendering engine. That means we can potentially bring these into iOS, Android and Xamarin charts quickly, sharing the core code from our WPF charts. This is something on our roadmap for the latter part of 2017.

SciChart 3D can be ported to iOS, Android and Xamarin using our Cross Platform C++ 3D Engine

Continuing Innovation on SciChart WPF (Throughout 2017)

Throughout 2017 we will continue to innovate on SciChart WPF, adding both 2D and 3D chart types, performance improvements, API improvements and more.

SciChart UWP or WinForms – Available on Request

We are considering to expand our WPF offering to make a UWP version of SciChart, or a maybe a WinForms version. If we do this, it will be included for free in ‘SciChart WPF’ which will become ‘SciChart Windows Edition’.

Microsoft seems to be investing a lot in the UWP Platform: Check out the #WindowsDevDay Hashtag on Twitter which heavily features UWP.  Although this only runs on Windows 10 and up, it also allows XAML-based applications to run on XBox, Hololens, and a slew of future devices such as Windows 10 on ARM. Although the platform has seen a slow start, it seems to be the direction that Microsoft is taking XAML development. UWP also ties in nicely with our Xamarin charts which are in Alpha now.

Also, quite a few of our customers use SciChart in a WinForms app using the Microsoft ElementHost control. This works fine, however, for developers without WPF knowledge it can be bit of a learning curve to understand MVVM, bindings and so on. SciChart can be used without MVVM, or bindings, but the API would feel a lot more natural to WinForms users if it were a WinForms control. It might also help us to debug and develop code which uses DirectX, as the PIX Debugger cannot be attached to WPF processes.

So we want to hear from you. Do you want to see a UWP version of SciChart? Or a WinForms version? Would that influence your current or future buying decisions? If so, contact us and let us know.

The UWP platform has been discussed a lot internally. It’s not easy to write for actually. Some of the APIs in WPF are just not present in UWP however, if this becomes an area where people are seriously considering to invest then we should support it. Again, will it influence your buying decision?

Project ‘Spaceship’: Platform unification through code-reuse (2017 and Beyond)

At SciChart, our mission statement is moulding into becoming the Market Leader in cross-platform 2D & 3D native charts. Why native? Well, we believe speed and performance are paramount. We tested some of our critical data-transformation algorithms in Javascript and they lost 90-95% performance when compared to native code. That’s 90%+ of your CPU wasted due to Javascript. Even on the V8 Chrome engine which is supposed to be fast. So, yes, HTML5/Javascript is probably the future for many line of business apps, but it just cannot compete with the speed offered by native code. You can only get maximum performance when you write native code (that is, not interpreted or scripted languages). There is a significant market for native chart components where speed & power cannot be compromised.

So we have a plan for this. We call it project ‘Spaceship’ – like Benny from the lego movie man that really wanted to build a spaceship. It was the most awesome spaceship and he’d been dying to make it all through the movie  That’s kind of what we want to do with SciChart. We have already laid the groundwork.

SciChart: Project Spaceship! Cross Platform, High Performance, Native 2D & 3D Charts with a common C++ core

1. We have a common C++ core for 3D Charts. This is a rendering engine which is cross-platform compatible and the core SciChart3D classes which are written in C++. We are working now to expand this to include core algorithms such as data-transformation, DirectX hardware accelerated drawing and data resampling used in 2D Charts.
2. We already have WPF charts, but what if we were to split these into a .NET layer, then write thin layers on top for WPF, UWP and possibly WinForms (if requested)?
3. We already have an iOS and Android chart component, as well as Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android binding libraries in the works (to be released end Q1 2017). These could potentially share the common C++ core to allow us to introduce 3D Charts to iOS, Android and Xamarin by end 2017 as well as share code across all three platforms.
4. Speed. C++ is very fast. We have actually prototyped a layer which does our WPF core rendering and data-transformation algorithms in C++ with SIMD/Vectorization. While this is not ready for production, the initial results were very promising, giving an overall speed increase of 3-3.5x in our WPF Charts.
5. More importantly code-reuse. Writing code three or four times in different languages is very costly and error prone. C++ is the original cross-platform language! It compiles onto pretty much everything if you write it correctly. It might even work on Web, if WebAssembly ever becomes standard.

The above lays a path to complete coverage of Rich, Interactive Charting across Windows, as well as iOS & Android mobile platforms natively, as well as with Xamarin. We are also currently investigating writing NativeScript and ReactNative examples to see if we can use our iOS & Android charts in these exiting new hybrid frameworks.

SciChart: iOS & Android Realtime Charts in NativeScript & ReactNative?

If you don’t know what NativeScript is, take a look…

This and ReactNative are ingenious frameworks which allow you to write code in HTML5/Javascript or TypeScript which compiles down to native code, meaning speed, performance, on mobile and web platforms, in a very popular language set. You can consume native iOS and Android libraries in both NativeScript and ReactNative. We are working on a prototype now to see if it is possible to use SciChart iOS/Android with NativeScript – allowing Realtime, High Performance NativeScript Charts. If so, we plan to publish examples of how to use our iOS & Android charts with NativeScript soon after the SciChart iOS & Android v2.0 release.

Our Mission Statement

The Best WPF Charts -> The Best Cross Platform Charts?

SciChart is the unofficial ‘Worlds Best WPF Chart’ and we receive excellent reviews and testimonials from our customers for flexibility, speed, power, easy of use as well as for our helpfulness on tech support and willingness to help you get the job done. We are so pleased to be able to serve you and you our customers make this possible.

What we want to do is to expand our offerings into many platforms so as to future proof ourselves, and also give some of you a path to upgrade. We know that some companies are considering other platforms and are moving away from WPF. However, the vast majority of business users are staying on the Windows and .NET ecosystem, leveraging the expertise they have in house from existing, established C# .NET teams. As a result, we continue to bet on Microsoft while expanding into mobile and possibly web platforms in the coming years.

Your Feedback Welcome!

We’d love to hear your feedback on our plans. Tell us how we are doing. Whether good or bad, we want to hear it.

We’re aware of some areas that we are doing really well, and some not so well. We are working hard to improve our working processes and get better at delivering while growing, as well as maintaining the quality you have come to expect from us.

Your feedback welcome, contact us anytime!

Best regards,

Andrew
Managing Director, 
SciChart

The post SciChart 2017: The Vision & Roadmap appeared first on WPF Charts, iOS and Android Charts | SciChart.

We are pleased to announce the release of SciChart v4.2.2 Build 9777. This is a minor update which contains many critical bug fixes and minor improvements. It is strongly advised for users of SciChart v4.x to upgrade to this version, which is a drop-in replacement.

We’re committed to providing our customers with the best experience possible, and as a result, we continue to update and improve our popular WPF Charts components!

What’s New in v4.2.2?

Critical Bug Fixes

• Updated Installer to force upgrade / uninstall of old version of scichart when installing 4.2.2. Fixes issue where SciChart Licensing Wizard crashes after install when a previous version was installed
• Added some lock(SyncRoot) to public methods on DataSeries where getting indices range, or getting Y Range. Prevents race conditions and crashes.
• SC-3946 VerticalLineAnnotation. ShowLabel crashing issue. Fix for Null reference exception in MouseDown event in a AnnotationLabel. fix for “disappearing proper Labels in VerticalLineAnnotation”
• SC-3918 Fixed 3D VertexSelectionModifier crashes in some cases
• Fix for memory leak in series binding (Ticket “Releasing Heatmap2DArrayDataSeries from memory”)
• Test for releasing memmory when Collection is changing in Series biding.
• Test for memory leak in Series binding caused by unsubscribing from ParentSurface event.
• SC-3862 On Finalize of SciChartSurface in an ItemTemplate, you get occassional ‘Element has already has a logical parent. It must be detached from the old parent before it is attached to a new one’ error. Stopped removing Axis from SciChartSurface in Unloaded handler in Finalizer . SuspendUpdates around UpdateLayout() in PrepareSurfaceForExport stops exceptions thrown/caught in export
• SC-3857 Fixed the issue when LogAxis threw if VisibleRange contained NaNs (https://abtsoftware.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/SC-3857)

Other Bug Fixes

• Added fix for Axis.TitleStyle with DataTemplate when exporting;
• SC-3937 Dev Mode: add “Export to…” option to the Toolbar for testing purposes
• SC-3958 Fixed the issue with points selection when selection rect goes outside the window bounds (https://abtsoftware.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/SC-3958)
• SC-3943 Fixed the issue with setting the Content property of CustomAnnotation to a non-UI element; added a test(https://abtsoftware.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/SC-3943)
• SC-3924 “Stacked Columns Side by Side”: rollover marker doesn’t appear. Added new control template and a style. Modified converter so that he can handle null values, we need this for GradientsBrush
• SC-3926 Rollover/Cursor/Tooltip wrong tooltip for the last point in a digital series
• SC-3199 Fixed “Create Custom Theme” example – no render series appear. because of Freeze AttachedProperty we can not create a modifieble copy of brush for XAML renderer
• SC-3929 Fixed SelectionOffset issue in pie/donut charts
• SC-3920 Fixed the “Using Tooltip Modifier Tooltips” example (https://abtsoftware.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/SC-3920)
• Fixed Legend PointMarker disappearing after export issue;
• SC-3913 Fixed the issue when BoxPlotSeries doesn’t draw well on a vertical chart; added default fill brush for BoxPlotSeries; added lines clipping to the XAML RenderContext; added visual tests
• Fixed legendModifier horizontal\vertical scrollbars visibility when exporting
• Fixed draw text with YAxis.FlipCoordinate = false;
• SC-3671 Fixed VerticalAlignment Top and Center issue in VerticalLineAnnotation. Added checking if anchors dataPoint are NaN. The same was done for HorizontalLineAnnotation
• Added a test when all values are the same, autorange does not calculate an invalid range

API Improvements

• Made AttachAnnotation/DetachAnnotation methods virtual in the CompositeAnnotation class to allow overidding the default behavior(see the ticket #PLL-483-27180);
• Code refactoring. Added a possibility to override Modifier action when a specific Modifier Key is pressed.
• SC-3934 Fixed the issue when MajorDelta,MinorDelta bindings get broken (or not updated) after changing AutoTicks. (https://abtsoftware.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/SC-3934)
• Fixed LegendModifier.Legend ScrollBarVisibility issues and binding errors
• Supply correct error message in AxisCollection.GetAxisById() when more than one, or no axis exists with ID
• SC-3859 ISciChartSurfaceBase interface does not include ExportToBitmap / ExportToFile methods
• SC3D-359 Combined D3D9 and D3D10/11 C++ Dlls in SciChart3D Native to reduce DLL count and SciChart.Charting3D.Dll size by half.
  – Implemented mechanism to choose D3D9 or D3D11/10 in Viewport3D.cs.
  – Deleted all projects associated with D3D9
  – changed for native code to match twister changes
  – a flag can be used to start in d3d9 mode
• Added missing XML comments for PieChart components;
• Add ability to disable click Selection of segments
• Rename property “AllowSelection” to “AllowClickSelection”
• SC3D-361 Refactor SCRTImmediateDraw.SetBlendState() / SetRasterizerState() / SetDepthStencilState to use push pop stack
• SC-3827 Modify SourceCollectionBase to link to INotifyCollectionChanged not ObservableCollection<IRenderableSeriesViewModel>

Aesthetic Issues Resolved

• SC-3917 Fill gradients for candlesticks – refactored XamlPolygonDrawingContext a little (https://abtsoftware.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/SC-3917)
• SC-3917 Fixed candlesticks gradients for Hs, Hq brushes (https://abtsoftware.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/SC-3917)
• SC-3916 Fixed gradient for vertical charts with DirectX renderer https://abtsoftware.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/SC-3916
• SC-3917 Improved candlestick series drawing with gradient brushes https://abtsoftware.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/SC-3917
• SC-3916 Considered custom transformations on brush for gradient fill https://abtsoftware.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/SC-3916
• SC-3957 Investigated and fixed when pie/donut charts not resizing well issue. Fixed pie/donut issue when one segment is 100% the pie disappears
• SC-3917 FIxed gradient fill with XamlPolygonDrawingContext (https://abtsoftware.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/SC-3917)
• SC-3944 Fixed the issue with opacity not working for some series types; added tests (https://abtsoftware.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/SC-3944)
• SC-3914 Fixed series Opacity issue with XamlRenderContext. (https://abtsoftware.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/SC-3914)
• SC-3916 Working on gradient rotation for filled series – added rotation to XamlPolygonDrawingContext (https://abtsoftware.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/SC-3916)
• Fixed usage of aliasing in XamlLineDrawingContext
• SC-3912 Demo App shows an old logo
• Documentation: Updated Installing SciChart page to include Uninstalling
• SC3D-362 3D CrossHairsMode.Plane is hard to see because of blending
• SC-3836 Add box outline to 3D CubeGeometry example

Where to get it?!

You can get all the SciChart Releases from the www.scichart.com/downloads page. If you haven’t created an account with SciChart.com yet, please do. You will need to in order to access the downloads.

If you are a customer of SciChart you can also access our binaries via our NuGet feed as well as Github (for source-code customers).

What Else is on our Roadmap?

Recently we have taken a moment to evaluate where we have been, and are planning to go as a business. There is SciChart Annual report 2016 which shows how we are doing as a business.

We have also shared SciChart Vision and Roadmap – for 2017 and beyond.

Please take a moment to read the above and we would very much value your feedback on our current and future roadmap for SciChart!

Best regards,
[SciChart Team]

The post SciChart WPF v4.2.2 Build 9777 Released! appeared first on WPF Charts, iOS and Android Charts | SciChart.

// Are Objective C Examples Useful?

We have a question for our iOS Charts userbase about whether we should be supporting ObjectiveC and Swift, or just Swift in our examples and documentation.

At the moment SciChart iOS v1.x has ios chart examples and documentation in both Objective C and Swift. However, whenever customers request tech support or ask for examples, they are almost always asking for Swift 3 examples.

Question:

Should our iOS Chart Examples and Documentation be in both ObjectiveC and Swift, or just Swift?

It would save us a lot of time to support Swift 3 only in our examples. Can you take a moment to let us know which languages you expect us to create examples in for our upcoming SciChart iOS Charts v2.0?

Note: Our iOS Chart controls will, and always will be, written in Objective C. They will support both Objective C and Swift. Just we want to know if the examples should be Swift only, or both languages.

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The post Should we ship iOS Chart examples in ObjectiveC? Or just Swift? appeared first on WPF Charts, iOS and Android Charts | SciChart.

In the past few weeks, we have been working on shaping our product and vision for SciChart WPF, with the help of feedback from our userbase and potential customers. One of the requests which you have asked for is the ability to have the SciChart WPF Examples source code available *outside the installer*. As a result, we have taken the step to setup automatic publishing of the SciChart WPF Examples Suite to Github, referencing the SciChart WPF DLLs from NuGet. We are hoping that this will be a powerful resource which will enable our users to fall into the pit of success when using SciChart!

What is in SciChart WPF Examples Repository?

The SciChart WPF Examples Repository can be found on Github under the ABTSoftware organization. This is a public repository with an open source License. You are free to clone it using Git or SVN clients, download the code, and use anything in it for commercial or open source purposes.

The repository contains

SciChart WPF Examples Source Code

• The full source code for the SciChart WPF v4.x Examples Suite
• The full source code for the SciChart WPF v5.x Examples Suite (BETA)

SciChart WPF Tutorials

• The full source code for the SciChart WPF Tutorials, which were published last month on our website

SciChart WPF Examples Sandbox

• A sandbox area to create examples for users who ask for them.
• Currently there is one example published: The Custom Modifier Sandbox

Cloning the Repository and Building the Source

• You can clone the repository with Git, Tortoise SVN client, or download a zip.
• You will need Visual Studio 2010, 2012, 2013 or 2015 installed.
• You will need to setup the NuGet feed as per our instructions ‘Getting Started with NuGet’
• After that just build and run. The SciChart.Wpf.Examples will get all packages from NuGet and will build and run!

Wait, What? SciChart Examples v5?

That’s right! You heard correctly. We are now publishing an Early Access Preview of the the SciChart WPF Examples v5 to the Github repository, along side SciChart WPF v5 BETA to our abtsoftware-bleedig-edge (BETA) NuGet Feed.

SciChart WPF v5 IS A VERY EARLY BETA. This version of SciChart is very much in flux. We wanted to be able to showcase what we have been working on as well as give some of our customers early access to the next major version of SciChart, which is currently on schedule to be released in May.

WPF v5 Burndown Chart as of March 2016. Expected delivery in May 2016

If you want to see what we’re doing for SciChart WPF v5, head on over to our Public Issue Tracker where you can see the sprints, the tasks in progress and our statuses. ‘Delivered’ state means published to NuGet & Github!

New Features coming soon to SciChart WPF v5

WPF Radar Chart

From one of the surveys we learned that  Radar Charts are important to many users.

This 2D Chart will be added to SciChart WPF v 5 to allow displaying radars with customizable axes and selectable series or data-points. This chart type has been built from the ground up using our fast 2D drawing technology and looks great!

The WPF Radar Chart type allows unlimited, configurable ‘Radar Axis’ with data series as Polygons, Point-Markers or Lines. Tooltips and Legends and theming come as standard

You can see an example of use here.

WPF Discontinuous DateTime Axis

In WPF v5 new DiscontinuousDateTimeAxis type is going to be introduced. This is a special axis type, specifically for financial / trading charts, which will allow you to skip ranges (overnight, weekend). It will support series with differing lengths for the first time in trading charts. This opens the possibility of all sorts of indicators and filtering techniques previously impossible with SciChart. It will allow you to use Range, Tick, Volume or Time based bars. It preserves the position on Annotations on time-frame changes. It allows showing/hiding of overnight trading on exchanges with extended trading data.

The DiscontinuousDateTimeAxis type allows Volume, Range, Price and Tick Bars as well as a calendar for skipping overnight segments/weekends for true support for financial stock charts.

You can see an example of use here.

Uniform Heatmap Type

The heatmap type is undergoing radical transformation. We have a new FastUniformHeatmapRenderableSeries. This is up to 10x faster than the existing FastHeatmapRenderableSeries for the case where cells are uniformly spaced and supports the PaletteProvider API. This works best with DirectX.

The Uniform heat map type has been heavily optimised, now yielding up to 10x faster rendering when compared to v4.x FastHeatmapRenderableSeries

You can see an example of use here

Non-Uniform Heatmap Type

Still in progress, we have a Non-Uniform heatmap type which will supercede the existing FastHeatmapRenderableSeries. This fixes issues where the Y cells don’t match the spacing provided by the user. We also hope it will be faster and more flexible than the existing FastHeatmapRenderableSeries. Still a work in progress

The new Non-Uniform Heatmap in SciChart WPF v5 fixes several issues that were present in the Heatmap from v4

You can see an example of use here

AxisBindings, AnnotationBindings, SeriesBinding3D MVVM API

Still in progress, following the success if our SeriesBinding MVVM API in SciChart WPF 2D Charts, we have extended this API to cover Axis, Annotations in 2D Charts as well as Series and Axis in 3D Charts.

The new MarkupExtensions which will allow you to manipulate series, axis, and annotations from the ViewModel are:

• AxisBinding MarkupExtension
• AnnotationBinding MarkupExtension
• SeriesBinding3D MarkupExtension

You can see an example of use will be published shortly to the SciChart WPF v5.x Examples Suite.

Waterfall3D Chart Type

A new Waterfall Chart Type, for viewing area/slices from a 2D array data series, displayed in a 3D Chart. Both realtime and static versions of the chart will be provided.

The new WPF Waterfall 3D Chart Type allows rendering of mountain slices at discrete intervals in 3D. Also supports realtime updates!

Performance improvements

Customers looking for point clouds charts will be able to render more than a million points. We are pleased to announce that we have improved our Point –Cloud chart has been heavily optimised to put more emphasis on the Graphics Card. As a result, Point Clouds in SciChart v5.x are up to 10x faster in SciChart v4.

3D Point Cloud and 3D Scatter Charts in SciChart v4.x were a performance bottleneck. These have been optimised heavily for SciChart WPF v5!

PointLine 3D Charts are also up to 5x faster. These are now more heavily GPU reliant so if you have a powerful graphics card, you will see a bigger performance boost than before.

Point-Line 3D Charts in SciChart v4 were slow, so we spent time to optimise these heavily to be more GPU reliant.

Waterfall3D Charts have been written full GPU accelerated. This chart type is slick and fast and able to handle hundreds of slices with thousands of points each, updating in realtime.

Don’t forget the Heatmap type which is now 10x faster for the uniform case!

Finally, we’re aware that some users have asked for more performance in specific cases, notably:

• FIFO Series with many millions of points
• Scatter series when using Paletteprovider

These are on our radar The Scatter Series we basically have to re-write to allow sending X,Y coordinate and Color to the graphics card. If we do that it will dramatically improve performance. The FIFO chart we did improve a little bit in v4.2.3 but what we really need to do is avoid a copy step and unwrap data before drawing. In prototype we saw  5-6x performance increase for huge FIFO data series.

Until then, there are workarounds, so if you are experiencing one of the two performance issues above, Contact Us and we will do our best to help.

Continuous Delivery

Our approach is continuous delivery, report a bug, sometimes we fix it same-day and push to Github/ NuGet. If you’re a SciChart WPF customer you can get the code changes within minutes and apply them to your build, allowing you to get on with your day to day business. Now how many can say that!

Please note that the examples published from v5 are still work in progress. They are likely to change and the API for SciChart WPF v5 will change as we work on it.

There are some API changes from SciChart v4 – > v5. This should be considered a breaking change. We haven’t yet collated and published a list of API changes. This will occur when we are ready for release.

Pricing and Upgrades

SciChart WPF v5 will be a free upgrade to all existing customers of SciChart WPF who are within support subscription. If you purchase SciChart WPF licenses with support subscription today, then SciChart WPF v5 will be included for free when it is released.

If your support has expired recently, and you wish to try out SciChart WPF v5, then please get in contact with Sales to arrange a renewal, which you will be entitled to a discount for!

Finally,

If you want to try out SciChart WPF v5 Early Access Preview then feel free! If you have any feedback for us, we would love to hear it.
best regards,

[The SciChart Team]

The post SciChart WPF Examples, Tutorials source now on GitHub! appeared first on WPF Charts, iOS and Android Charts | SciChart.

It’s been a while since we’ve shipped a WPF release, as we are busy working on a number of exciting projects! However today we are pleased to announce that an important stability update for SciChart WPF: v4.2.3.10185 has been released.

What’s New in SciChart WPF v4.2.3.10185?

Lots and lots of bugs fixed! It is recommended for all users of SciChart WPF v4.x to update to the latest version, which should be a drop in replacement.

Critical Bugs (Crash or Memory Leak) Fixed

• SC-4113 Fixed Memory Leak in DirectX when EnableForceWaitForGPU=true
• SC-4096 Fixed an issue when RolloverModifier crashed when being synchronized and a surface placed in a TabControl
• SC-4060 Fixed an export to XPS issue where AxisPanel would throw because of not frozen internal bitmap
• SC-4085 Fixed the issue when LogarithmicAxis would crash if change ScientificNotation and use the default formatting
• SC-4010 Fixed interaction between ZoomPanModifier and PinchZoomModifier, as well as mouse event handling after touch events
• SC-4068 Fixed the issue when DataPointSelectionModifier threw on UpdateState
• SC-4041 Fixes blank screen on restart after sleep in 3D Charts
• SC-3368 Memory leak in DataSeries.Detach / _dsToNotify hashset
• SC-4041 Fixes Unhandled NullReferenceException – Direct3D10Image.OnIsFrontBufferAvailableChanged
• SC-4001 Fixed performance problem causing stutterring when Fifo Series and Legend is used
• SC-4053: Added throwing proper information when user tries to bind annotation to non-existent axis; fixed crash when adding line annotation on chart without data
• Fixes occasional InvalidOperationException / cross thread access in Direct3D10RenderSurface.Dispose when called from the finalizer thread
• Fixed Thread safety issue in BitmapContext.Dispose(). Ensure dictionary of open contexts is locked before removal

Minor Improvements

• SC-4114: fixed issue when dashed lines in legend don’t correctly represent their corresponding series
• SC-4116: Proper zoom extents for StackedColumns when ZeroLineY equals min or max DataRange
• SC-4115: fixed bad bindings for Ternaries Charts
• SC3D-409 SurfaceMeshRenderableSeries does not respond to VisibleRange change
• SC-4060 Added freezing of resources after deserialization
• SC-4064 Fixed an issue when a SelectedSeries would become deselected after chart re-load in MVVM scenarios
• SC-4059 Investigate ZoomPanModifier faster panning speed in MouseEventGroup – Merged pull request https://github.com/ABTSoftware/SciChartWPF/pull/7
• SC-4058 Investigate jumping VisibleRange with CategoryAxis – Merged pull request #6 from https://github.com/ABTSoftware/SciChartWPF/pull/6
• SC-4030 ThemeManager isn’t thread safe – Merged pull request #5 from https://github.com/ABTSoftware/SciChartWPF/pull/5
• SC-4047: modified example to make DataPointSelectionModifier work with SplineLineRenderableSeries
• SC-4057 Fixed the issue when PanModifier overrode the CursorProperty on the ParentSurface
• SC-4031: added ability to set major and minor delta for category axes
• SC-4035 Fixes after activating expired serial key, Licensing Wizard says Trial
• SC-4026 Fixed and changed horizontal line annotation template
• SC-4025 Fixed shared RolloverModifier work with vertical charts
• SC-3997 Fixed the issue when RolloverModifier doesn’t work well on synchronized surfaces with different alignment of Y axis
• Fixes bug where Text Values for double.NaN values in Heatmap cells are drawn as “NAN”
• Fixed vertical alignment of text inside a chart legend
• Fixed issue when scrolling for category axis started from wrong point – Merge pull request #8 from UnitedTraders/bugfix/too-fast-pan-fix-2
• Fixed 3D Charts height map edges incorrect rendering
• Fixes binding error in Using TooltipModifier Tooltips example
• Made some properties in SeriesValueModifier protected to make overriding easier

Where to Get It?

SciChart WPF v4.2.3.10185 is available from the usual channels.

• By downloading from our scichart.com/downloads page
• By Install-Package or Update-Package from NuGet
• By cloning or downloading the source code on Github (source code customers only)

Please ensure you uninstall previous version(s) of SciChart before installing v4.2.3 as this can prevent some issues in the upgrade process!

What’s Coming Soon?

We are still working hard on a massive release of SciChart iOS & Android v2, which will include Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android support. You can access early BETA’s of all three via our public Github repositories:

• SciChart.iOS.Examples
• SciChart.Android.Examples
• SciChart.Xamarin.Examples

Each of the above repositories pulls binaries for SciChart iOS/Android/Xamarin v2 from Cocoapods (iOS), Maven (Android) and NuGet (Xamarin). Full build instructions are included in the Readme.md in the above repositories.

SciChart WPF Development in progress

We are also still working on a major update to SciChart WPF. This will feature a number of new 2D+3D Chart types as well as improvements to speed, stability and API for our WPF customerbase.

We have delayed releasing this since we want to get it right, and we have so many users using SciChart WPF v4 with great success, that there is no significant rush to get to market and we want to ensure when we do deliver, it will be super-awesome.

If you want to preview SciChart WPF v5 you can do so, again via a public Github repository, which also pulls assemblies from NuGet.

• SciChart.WPF.Examples

Best regards,
[SciChart Team]

The post SciChart WPF v4.2.3 Build 10185 Released! appeared first on WPF Charts, iOS and Android Charts | SciChart.

We are really excited to announce, the result of a year of hard work and effort by our mobile team, that SciChart iOS/Android v2 is around the corner!

We are choosing to release today as a ‘BETA’ and invite feedback from our user-base. A full release will be done shortly, once we have polished everything and done final testing and checks.

SciChart Mobile v2: A huge Step forward

Our iOS and Android Charts feature a number of new chart types, including Bubble, Error Bars, Heatmap, Stacked Column and Stacked Mountain

SciChart iOS/Android v2 is a huge step forward in our iOS & Android charts. While our first version of SciChart iOS/Android benchmarked as the fastest Android and fastest iOS charts in the world, they lacked a few critical features that were important to would-be customers and creators of rich mobile charting applications.

Thanks to some brave early adopters, and great feedback from our iOS/Android customers, we have done a lot of work to improve our  iOS & Android charts, and bring you Xamarin support in our latest major release, as well as a host of new features and improvements that will make your apps really stand out.

SciChart iOS/Android Showcase features a Spectrum Analyzer app!

We’ve done a lot of work to optimize performance for swift users (even more!) and update to Swift 3 support on iOS, while maintaining our Objective-C heritage for our iOS Charts. We’ve created and updated 60 examples for each of SciChart iOS, SciChart Android as well as 20+ examples for SciChart Xamarin, showcasing the speed, power and flexibility of our iOS & Android charts. These examples are going to be published soon and we have a host of website updates in the works as well.

We’ve created a brand new Showcase application which has at the moment two ‘featured apps’ – a Spectrum Analyzer which analyzes audio from the microphone in realtime, and an ECG monitor which you can download and use to get started creating realtime scientific apps right away.

Multi pane stock charts are super awesome now on iOS/Android and Xamarin!

SciChart iOS/Android v2 is being marketed towards creators of scientific and financial apps.

Apps that require realtime, big data, fast updates, displaying of large amounts information from sensors, financial data-feeds and remote servers.

Stock charting (financial charting) is a first class citizen in SciChart iOS & Android, allowing you to create rich, realistic trading apps using our libraries. You can create audio analyzers, monitor sensor data, hook up our charts to medical test equipment and more. SciChart makes your impossible projects possible with our speed and power which is second to none!

Features in SciChart iOS/Android v2

• Unification of the Android and iOS APIs.
  • This has resulted in some API changes (list to be published) but also brings uniform API to our WPF (Windows), iOS, Android and Xamarin charts.
• Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android support, enabling use of our iOS/Android charts in Xamarin applications.
• New Themes and Theme manager support, custom themes.
• Logarithmic Axis on both iOS+Android Platforms
• Stacked Columns and Stacked Mountain Charts  on both iOS+Android Platforms
• 100% Stacked Columns and 100% Stacked Mountain charts on both iOS+Android Platforms
• Gradient Lines on both iOS+Android Platforms
• Error Bars on both iOS+Android platforms
• Bubble Charts on both iOS+Android platforms
• CustomAnnotation on both iOS+Android platforms
• Dashed Lines on both iOS+Android platforms
• Vertical/HorizontalLineAnnotation on both iOS+Android Platforms
• Inertial Scroll on both platforms.
• Up to 60 examples for each iOS/Android platform, as well as 20 for Xamarin platform.
• Maven package manager support for Android, Cocoapods for iOS, NuGet for Xamarin.
• Swift 3 support for iOS, and performance enhancements for Swift users.
• A set of tutorials to get started on both platforms!

How to Access the BETA

Our BETAs are published to the following channels for the moment.

• SciChart iOS Examples on Github
• SciChart Android Examples on Github
• SciChart Xamarin Examples on Github

Each Github repositories contain the full source code for SciChart iOS/Android/Xamarin v2 Examples. The binaries are pulled from Maven (Android), Cocoapods (iOS) and NuGet (Xamarin). Instructions on how to setup your local machine to get the binaries are included in the above repos, in the readme.md.

Getting Started: Tutorials

We’ve published tutorials to get started with SciChart iOS/Android/Xamarin v2. These can be found below.

• SciChart iOS Tutorials (Swift 3)
• SciChart Android Tutorials (Java)
• SciChart Xamarin.iOS Tutorials – coming soon (C#)
• SciChart Xamarin.Android Tutorials (C#)

Pricing and Upgrades

SciChart iOS/Android/Xamarin v2 pricing can be seen at our Store page. Existing customers of SciChart iOS/Android can continue to use iOS/Android v2 versions released before support expiry for free. New customers who purchase today can use both v1 and v2 (all versions released before support expiry).

Special Discounts for SciChart WPF Customers

Are you a customer of SciChart WPF and interested in iOS, Android or Xamarin? If so, we are offering a 30%, limited time discount to existing customers of SciChart WPF to purchase SciChart iOS/Android.

This offer is valid to existing customers of SciChart WPF within support-expiry, until 5th September 2017. 

Pricing becomes:

• SciChart iOS (no source code): Was $789, Now $552.30 USD!
• SciChart iOS (with source code): Was $1499, Now $1049.30 USD
• SciChart iOS & Android (no source code): Was $1249, Now $874.30 USD
• SciChart iOS & Android (with source code): Was $1749, Now $1224.30 USD
• SciChart Android (no source code): Was $789, Now $552.30 USD
• SciChart Android (with source code): Was $1499, Now $1049.30 USD

If the above offers are of interest to you, contact sales to get a quote asking for the ‘existing customer Xamarin upgrade’

Finally,

We work hard to keep our customers happy, but we don’t know everything! So, if you find a problem or a bug, contact us to let us know. We will do our best to fix it.

Also, if you have any feedback for us, good or bad, we would love to hear it!

Best regards,
[The SciChart Team]

The post SciChart iOS /Android / Xamarin BETA Released! appeared first on WPF Charts, iOS and Android Charts | SciChart.

Yesterday we announced that SciChart iOS/Android v2 was officially in BETA. This latest release of SciChart iOS/Android also includes the eagerly awaited Xamarin support! 

In this video and article we’re going to show you how to get started with SciChart for Xamarin. Xamarin development is a little different from plain WPF development so there are a few things you need to know. However, once you have worked through this tutorial you’ll be able to create simple apps with SciChart for Xamarin!

Quickest of the Quick Start Guides

01 Downloading the SciChart library

SciChart iOS & Android Xamarin are binding libraries (thin wrappers) around our existing SciChart iOS & Android Native Chart Components. You can download Xamarin together with SciChart iOS and SciChart Android from our downloads page.

You can clone the repository for the SciChart Xamarin Examples here. This builds in Visual Studio 2015 with Xamarin 10.3. Also, you can get the NuGet packages for SciChart.iOS, SciChart.Android from our SciChart official NuGet Feed.

02 Setting up a Development Environment

Note: If you’ve already setup a development environment for xamarin, feel free to skip this part! Instead, scroll down to ‘Downloading the SciChart Xamarin Examples’

To develop with Xamarin you will need Visual Studio 2015, or 2017. For the purpose of this article we’re going to use Visual Studio 2015. If you haven’t installed Visual Studio yet, please do so by downloading it and following instructions from here.

Installing Xamarin for Visual Studio

Let’s start by setting up a development environment for Xamarin. There are instructions on how to setup a dev environment over at developer.xamarin.com.

1. Right-click the Windows Start button and select Programs and Features.
2. Right-click Microsoft Visual Studio and click Change.
3. When the Visual Studio Installer dialog appears, click the Modify button.
4. In the Features tab, scroll down to Cross Platform Mobile Development. Click the checkbox next to C#/.NET (Xamarin):

Configuring Xamarin for Android development

If you want to develop for Android you will also need to install the JDK, The Android SDK and the Android NDK. During installation, the Visual Studio installer places these tools in their default locations and configures the development environment with the appropriate path configuration. Instructions on how to configure the location of the Android SDK, and install Android emulators can be found at the Xamarin Visual Studio 2015 Setup guide.

Configuring Xamarin for iOS Development

If you want to develop for iOS, you will need an OSX machine. This is a hard limitation for iOS development. The actual compilation is done on a Mac, even if development is done on Windows. This can be a Mac build server shared between many developers. it just needs to be configured correctly. 

The Mac build server should have Visual Studio for Mac installed as well as XCode. This will download the iOS, Android SDKs on your mac device. Once this is done you can connect your Visual Studio 2015 instance to the Mac build server.

Connecting to the Mac Build Server

For iOS Development only: after setting up your Mac build server, go to Visual Studio -> iOS -> Xamarin Mac Agent. Follow the steps from the Xamarin Developer Guide – Connecting to the Mac to ensure your VS2015 instance is correctly setup for iOS development.

03 Learning by Example – The Example Suite

Downloading the SciChart Xamarin Examples

OK if you’ve done all that, now it’s time to get to the good stuff! The SciChart Xamarin Examples are hosted on Github at https://github.com/ABTSoftware/SciChart.Xamarin.Examples. Let’s have a look at that page.

The SciChart.Xamarin.Examples repository on Github contains example code for SciChart’s Xamarin iOS & Android library

You can fetch the SciChart Xamarin examples code from Github by either:

• Cloning the repository as a Git repo
• Or, checkout the repository as an SVN repo
• Or, downloading as a Zip and unzipping.

Don’t let lack of Git or SVN stop you here, just download and go if you want!

Building the SciChart Xamarin Examples

After downloading the source for the SciChart Xamarin Examples, let’s go ahead and build the examples. You’ll need to open the Solution in \src\Xamarin.Examples.Deploy.sln in Visual Studio

#Setting up the NuGet Feed

SciChart.Xamarin assemblies are included in the SciChart NuGet feed. This is a private feed which you will need to add to Visual Studio. Instructions on how to setup the SciChart NuGet feeds can be found here.

In Visual Studio 2015, setup the SciChart NuGet feed to get SciChart Xamarin assemblies. You only have to do this once

To setup the NuGet feed:

• Go to Tools -> Options -> NuGet Package Manager -> Package Sources.
• Add a Package Source with Name=SciChart 2015 and URL=https://www.myget.org/F/abtsoftware/api/v3/index.json

#Connecting to Mac Development Server

If you want to build Xamarin.iOS, you will need to connect to a Xamarin Mac Development Server. Go to Tools -> iOS -> Xamarin Mac Agent and connect to a Mac. To do this I am using a local Mac, but you can use any Mac you have access to in the cloud. For instructions on how to setup the Xamarin Mac Agent please see developer.xamarin.com.

Note: If you don’t want to build for iOS, simply right-click and unload the project Xamarin.Examples.Demo.iOS. 

Select a Target and Run

That should be everything. All you need to do now is select a target and run! Spend a moment to play around with our examples. We’ve created about 20 of them and are planning to create more in the very near future.

#To run SciChart Xamarin.Android

Select Xamarin.Examples.Demo.Droid as the startup project. Connect a physical Android Device, or choose an Android simulator, and run!

#To Run SciChart Xamarin.iOS

Select Xamarin.Examples.Demo.iOS as the startup project. Connect a physical iOS Device, or choose an iOS Simulator, and run!

What Examples have we created?

We’ve taken the time to create approximately 20 examples for our high performance realtime charts in Xamarin Android and Xamarin iOS. These include:

Xamarin Scatter Chart

Xamarin Realtime Ticking Stock Charts

Xamarin Stacked Grouped Column Chart

Xamarin Rollover Tooltips Chart

Xamarin Mountain Chart

Xamarin Heatmap / Spectrogram Chart

The examples suite contains many more examples so it’s worth downloading them to run the examples and see what SciChart can do!

04 Creating your own Xamarin Android or iOS Apps

If you’ve successfully run the SciChart Xamarin Android/iOS demos and want to learn a bit more about SciChart, including how to create an app from scratch with SciChart, take a look at our tutorials which are now online.

These are found here:

• SciChart Xamarin.Android Tutorials
• SciChart Xamarin.iOS Tutorials 

05 Great, but I Have a Question about …

We believe you will not find better-supported chart controls than SciChart!

If you have a question, please feel free to ask at our Forums page. This is a Q&A forum page where we aim to answer all queries promptly.

But if you have specific sales or technical question, you can Contact us anytime and one of our staff will get back to you. We aim to answer all requests within 1-business day.

Thanks, and enjoy!

Tell us what you think! 

As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated. If there’s something you want to know or if you have any feedback for us. We would be glad to hear it!

Best regards,
[SciChart Team]

The post Getting Started with SciChart for Xamarin appeared first on WPF Charts, iOS and Android Charts | SciChart.

We are really excited to announce, that SciChart iOS/Android/Xamarin  v2 is released! Please note this is a major release that includes API breaking changes. Please see a full list of changes, improvements, and features below.

If you are using SciChart iOS v1.x or Android v1.x then please note that this update introduces breaking changes and is not a drop-in replacement for SciChart iOS/Android v1. 

What’s New in SciChart iOS/ Android /Xamarin v2?

Thanks to some brave early adopters, and great feedback from our iOS/Android customers, we have done a lot of work to improve our  iOS & Android charts, and bring you Xamarin support in our latest major release, as well as lots and lots of new features and improvements that will make your apps really stand out.

New Features

Xamarin Bindings

SciChart iOS/Android v2 now features Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android support, enabling the use of our iOS/Android charts in Xamarin applications. We have published the SciChart.iOS.dll and SciChart.Android.dll to our NuGet feed, ready for .NET developers to use this exciting cross-platform framework.

Stacked Column Chart Type

We’ve added Stacked Column charts natively to the SciChart iOS /Android v2 library, as well as a Xamarin binding. See our examples for iOS , Android and Xamarin Column Chart.

Stacked Mountain Chart type

We have added one more type to the Stacked renderable series, Stacked Mountain charts. Please see our native example here for iOS and Android, as well as Xamarin Bindings for both.

100% Stacked Columns and 100% Stacked Mountain charts

In addition to Stacked Columns, and Stacked Mountains, SciChart for iOS, Android & Xamarin now supports 100% Stacked Column and Mountain Chart Types. See our example for iOS 100% Stacked Columns Chart, Android 100% Stacked Columns Chart and Xamarin bindings for both.

Fan Chart

We’ve added a Fan Chart example for visualizing uncertainty and forecasts. This is based on our existing Band chart type for iOS, Android and Xamarin. See our examples for iOS Fan Chart and Android Fan Chart.

Custom Series Type (with Spline Line Example)

We’ve added a CustomRenderableSeries type to our iOS, Android, and Xamarin charts. One of our examples demonstrates this by creating a Spline Line for iOS/Android. See our example for iOS Spline Chart and Android Spline Chart.

Impulse Chart

Use for visualizing impulse responses in digital filters as well as some scientific chart types, the Impulse chart has been added to both iOS & Android. See our example for iOS Impulse Chart, Android Impulse Chart, and Xamarin Impulse Chart.

Error Bars Chart

We have added Error Bars to both iOS, Android platforms, as well as our Xamarin bindings. This is used to visualize error in scientific / research applications. See our examples for iOS Error Bars Chart, Android Error Bars Chart, and Xamarin Error Bars.

Bubble Charts

Bubble charts have been added to both iOS, Android platforms. Used to visualize a bubble at a specific X,Y location, sized by the Z parameter. See our examples of iOS Bubble Chart, Android Bubble Chart, and Xamarin Bubble Chart.

Dashed Lines on both iOS+Android platforms

Both iOS and Android platforms now have Dashed Line support. See our examples for iOS Dashed Line Chart and Android Dashed Line Chart.

PaletteProvider API for both iOS+Android Platforms

Both iOS and Android platforms now have PaletteProvider APIs, allowing you to dynamically colour individual data-points based on data-values. The PaletteProvider API has been added for many series types, including Line, Mountain, Scatter, Heatmap, Candlestick. See our examples on how to use the Palette Provider on iOS and Android Charts.

New Annotation Types

Our flexible and useful Annotations API has been improved in SciChart iOS/Android v2:

• CustomAnnotation on both iOS+Android platforms.
• VerticalLineAnnotation, HorizontalLineAnnotation on both iOS+Android Platforms

See our examples of Annotations in iOS, Annotations in Android and Xamarin.

New Theme Support

Both SciChart iOS and SciChart Android now have in-built theme support. Choose from 8 stunning themes, as well as create your own.

See our examples for iOS Theme Manager, Android Theme Manager, and Xamarin Theme Manager.

New Axis Types and new APIs

We have added the Logarithmic Axis to both SciChart iOS and Android. Use this to display data with a wide dynamic range on a logarithmic scale. See our examples on iOS Chart Logarithmic Axis and Android Chart Logarithmic Axis.

The Inertial Scroll and Pan on touch has also been added to both platforms.

Package Manager Support

All three platforms (iOS, Android, Xamarin) now have package manager support. We will be delivering continuously for bug fixes, features and minor updates according to Semantic Versioning (no breaking changes unless major version) to the following package sources.

• iOS Charts – Cocoapods
• Android Charts – Maven
• Xamarin Charts – NuGet

In addition our example code is now published to Github and is available to clone or download.

iOS Examples    Android Examples    Xamarin Examples

Improvements

• Performance for swift users has been optimized (even more!) and update to Swift 3 support on iOS, while maintaining our Objective-C heritage for our iOS Charts. See performance comparison for iOS and Android.
• Over a hundred examples have been created and updated for SciChart iOS, SciChart Android, as well as for SciChart Xamarin, showcasing the speed, power and flexibility of our charts. See examples for iOS, Android, Xamarin.

• Brand new Showcase application which has at the moment two ‘featured apps’ – a Spectrum Analyzer which analyzes audio from the microphone in realtime, and an ECG monitor which you can download and use to get started creating realtime scientific apps right away. SciChart has also been marketed towards creators of scientific and financial apps and many features has been tailored towards these niches.

Our new tutorials will make it all easy for you

We’ve published tutorials to get started with SciChart iOS/Android/Xamarin v2. These can be found below.

• SciChart iOS Tutorials (Swift 3)
• SciChart Android Tutorials (Java)
• SciChart Xamarin.iOS Tutorials (C#)
• SciChart Xamarin.Android Tutorials (C#)

Where to get SciChart Downloads?

You can get the SciChart iOS/Android/ Xamarin SDK v2.0 from the Downloads page. Source code customers can also get latest from our Github  repository as well as from Cocoapods for iOS, and Maven for Android.

Xamarin source code version is only shipped with SciChart iOS and Android 2D Enterprise version.

GET SCICHART IOS /ANDROID v2

Pricing and upgrades

Pricing for new Customers
If you are new to SciChart please visit our Store page. The full pricing and packages description can be seen there. If you are hesitant about something please feel free to contact our sales support.
New customers who purchase today can use both v1 and v2 (all versions released before support expiry).

Free for the existing customers of SciChart iOS/Android
If you are an existing customer with active support and updates subscription you can continue to use iOS/Android v2 versions released for free. If you wish to renew, please contact sales. Our renewals are up to 50% off the store price.

Discounted for the existing customers of SciChart WPF
Are you a customer of SciChart WPF and interested in iOS, Android or Xamarin? If so, we are offering a 30%, limited time discount to existing customers of SciChart WPF to purchase SciChart iOS/Android.

Pricing becomes:

• SciChart iOS (no source code): Was $789, Now $552.30 USD!
• SciChart iOS (with source code): Was $1499, Now $1049.30 USD
• SciChart iOS & Android (no source code): Was $1249, Now $874.30 USD
• SciChart iOS & Android (with source code): Was $1749, Now $1224.30 USD
• SciChart Android (no source code): Was $789, Now $552.30 USD
• SciChart Android (with source code): Was $1499, Now $1049.30 USD

This offer is valid to existing customers of SciChart WPF within support-expiry, until 5th September 2017. 

If the above offers are of interest to you, contact sales to get a quote asking for the ‘existing customer Xamarin upgrade.

CONTACT SALES

Best regards,

[SciChart Team]

The post SciChart iOS/Android/ Xamarin v2 Released appeared first on WPF Charts, iOS and Android Charts | SciChart.

We are pleased to announce the release of SciChart v4.2.4 Build 10393. This is a minor update which contains many critical bug fixes and minor improvements. It is strongly advised for users of SciChart v4.x to upgrade to this version, which is a drop-in replacement.

What’s New in SciChart WPF v4.2.4.10393?

Lots and lots of bugs fixed! It is recommended for all users of SciChart WPF v4.x to update to the latest version, which should be a drop in replacement.

Critical Bugs (Crash, Memory Leak, .NET 4.0 sustainability issues) Fixed 

• Memory optimization for the HqRenderContext – merged customer pull request
• Memory optimization for DataSeries/ resampling – merged customer pull request
• SC-4130: Fixed memory leaks when calling Clear on ItemsCollection – tested for unsubscribing from inner events in a RenderableSeriesSoruceCollection when SciChartGroup remove SciChartSurface
• SC-4130: Fixed memory leaks if calling Clear on ItemsCollection, caused by RenderableSeriesSourceCollection which was subscribing for ViewModels collection changed event
• SC-4141: Fixed memory leaks at DataPointSelectionModifier crashes if call UpdateState before the SelectedPMs property
• SC-4141: Fixed memory leak with a Modifiers dictionary in MouseManager: DataPointSelectionModifier crashes if call UpdateState before the SelectedPMs property
• SC-4141: Fixed DataPointSelectionModifier crash when calling UpdateState before the SelectedPMs property
• SC-4141: Fixed DataPointSelectionModifier crash when calling UpdateState before the SelectedPMs property
• Fixed example crash for uneven data in X\Y
• SC-4184: Fixed: bug “Using PointMarkers” crashes sometimes on real machine and on machine with .net 4.0
• Fixed other .Net 4.0 support issues with themes and styles
• SC-4137: Fixed Series With Metadata example crashes immediately
• SC-4137: Fixed “HitTest API” example crash
• SC-4179: Fixed bug for Export fails if set PointMarkerTemplate
• SC-4174: Fixed incorrect spline computations in the examples
• SC-4172: Fixed the issue when a CompositeAnnotation would throw NullReference in MVVM

Minor Improvements

• SC-4122: Fixed bug when DataDistributionCalculator is reset from UserDefinedDistributionCalculator when data series is cleared
• SC-4108: Fixed bug with Rendering artifacts when using digital line with DirectX by adding sample for drawing artifacts in Digital line using DirectX
• SC-4078: Fixed an issue when an annotation would appear if IsHidden set
• SC-4119: fixed issue when HorizontalLineAnnotation doesn’t get base points if HorizontalAlignment=Stretch
• Improvements: skip file overriding in case destination file is the same. files comparison is based on the cached MD5 checksum.
• SC-4154: Added ability ZoomHistoryManager working with SciScrollBar
• SC-4114: Fixed and improved the issue when dashed lines in legend don’t correctly represent their corresponding series
• Added SciChartInetractionToolbar to CreateACustomChart example instead of using buttons
• SC-4155: Prevented pushing changes to zoom history if AutoRange==Always
• SC-4122: Removed redundant recreating of distribution calculator on Clear()
• SC-4040: Prevented adding lists of values into data series with different count of values or null lists;
• SC-4108 Prevented the generation of the extra fill-up triangle when the Lines with adjacency are vertical or horizontal lines, to fix Rendering artifacts when using digital line with DirectX
• Added ability to display cursor label axis for multi panes if Y axis is collapsed, suggested by a customer

Where to Get It?

SciChart WPF v4.2.4.10393 is available from the usual channels.

• By downloading from our scichart.com/downloads page
• By Install-Package or Update-Package from NuGet
• By cloning or downloading the source code on Github (source code customers only)

Please ensure you uninstall the previous version(s) of SciChart before installing v4.2.4 as this can prevent some issues in the upgrade process!

GET SCICHART WPF v4.2.4

Any other news?

SciChart iOS/Android/Xamarin  v2 is released! This is a major release that includes API breaking changes and tons of improvements goes with that. Please read about changes, improvements, and features in the release note. We have also adjusted the pricing for new customers. Please get in touch if you have any questions.

SciChart WPF Development in progress

We are also still working on SciChart WPF v5 major update. This will feature a number of new 2D+3D Chart types as well as improvements to speed, stability, and API for our WPF customerbase.

We have delayed releasing this since we want to get it right, and we have so many users using SciChart WPF v4 with great success, that there is no significant rush to get to market and we want to ensure when we do deliver, it will be super-awesome.

If you want to preview SciChart WPF v5 you can do so, again via a public Github repository, which also pulls assemblies from NuGet.

SciChart.WPF.Examples

Best regards,
[SciChart Team]

The post SciChart WPF v4.2.4 Build 10393 Released! appeared first on Fast, Native Chart Controls for WPF, iOS, Android and Xamarin.

Following the release of version 2 of our iOS & Android chart controls we would like to take a moment to poll you, the users, for your opinion on SciChart iOS & Android.

What would you like to see us build? What do you think about subscription vs. perpetual pricing models? What wouldmake scichart more useful to use?

Please take 5 minutes to answer our short survey below. We welcome your feedback, good or bad, and it all helps us to make a better product!

Click to View the Survey

Best regards,

Andrew
[SciChart Team]

The post SciChart iOS/Android Features Survey appeared first on Fast, Native Chart Controls for WPF, iOS, Android and Xamarin.