Live graphing in .NET, for free

November 8, 2008 7:05 AM

What's the best way of adding a "live" graph to my .NET WinForms application, similar in behaviour to the scrolling CPU usage and pagefile graphs found in Task Manager? Must be free, not too ugly, and not too processor-intensive.
posted by matthewr to computers & internet (5 answers total)

I'm sure there's an API for system statistics like those, but is that what you're trying to graph? It's not clear from the question. That is, are you going to just be reading and graphing data provided by an API, or are you going to have to assemble and graph the data by hand?
posted by rhizome at 7:19 AM on November 8, 2008

No, the data is generated by my application. It's a load testing agent, which floods a server with requests and checks if they succeeded or failed. I want to graph things like the number of total requests and successful requests over time, as the agent runs.
posted by matthewr at 7:29 AM on November 8, 2008

If you're using 3.0/3.5, WPF supposedly helps a lot with this stuff. This guy has sample code for creating a fairly simple implementation of what you're looking for.
posted by mkultra at 7:36 AM on November 8, 2008

Oh, wait, you're using WinForms. Is upgrading not a possibility?
posted by mkultra at 7:37 AM on November 8, 2008

Yes, I could use WPF controls.

Thanks for the link, mkultra. I had tried that, and found it great visually, but a bit too processor-intensive. I commented out some of the eye candy stuff like the background glow and reduced the update speed, but even then it was using too much CPU.
posted by matthewr at 8:07 AM on November 8, 2008