What's new in Silverlight Elements 2.1

Silverlight Elements 2.1 ships with a range of new controls, improvements, bug fixes and performance enhancements. This page looks at the significant changes in Silverlight Elements 2.1.

Performance improvements

Silverlight Elements 4.1 benefits from all the performance tuning done across the WPF Elements and Phone Elements products. Bringing the performance required to run silky smooth controls on a resource constrainted device such as a cell phone up to our Silverlight product line means Silverlight Element 2.1 is blazingly fast!

New chart types - rose charts

Rose charts are the polar equivalent of bar charts. They're a striking way to present data sets where the elements are cyclical, such as monthly values, or where the order isn't important. Silverlight Elements can do normal rose charts or stacked rose charts (the latter shown here).

New chart types - radar charts

Radar charts are the polar equivalent of area charts. They're a great way for users to compare different aspects of data sets, for example to draw out the relative strengths and weaknesses of two products or plans. Overall Silverlight Elements 2.1 includes 12 polar chart types including polar line, polar scatter, polar spline series!

Charting improvement: step improvements

We've made a whole bunch of improvements to chart axes. For example, label frequency can differ from axis marker frequency to help deal with larger numbers of marker labels in an attractive way. This can be specified easily in the XAML mark up for any chart. Of course, if labels were to overlap the Silverlight Elements Charts will automatically skip labels by default to ensure charts are readable.

Charting improvement: title visibility improvements

Another nice simple axis enhancement is control over the axis title visibility. Easily configured in XAML or code.

Charting improvement: minimum range specification

Also on chart axes, you specify the minimum range a user can zoom into on a per-axis basis.