There was a requirement of presenting the data in Charts in one of application, I am working on currently. The data shown in pictorial form always have better impact then shown in tables (or gridview in asp.net 2.0). Although there are a lot of chart controls available for ASP.NET but most of them are not free. Finally I have found two good free alternatives that are…
WebChart Control for ASP.NET and ZedGraph .
1. WebChart Control for ASP.NET – It is very good control for creating charts in ASP.NET. It has all the standard features of a normal asp.net control like design-time properties, auto formatting. And presenting the data from SQL Server is very easy. There are very nice tutorials available also.
You can download it from http://www.carlosag.net/Tools/WebChart/Default.aspx .
There is a nice tutorial available on 4GuysFromRolla.com for creating charts using this control. The tutorial is available at A Look at WebCharts, a Free .NET Charting Control .
2. ZedGraph – ZedGraph is not a control but a Class Library for creating charts in ASP.NET. The best thing is that it is Open Source. Creating charts using this library is not so easy as in WebChart Control but I think it has more features if we compare both. And it has good documentation also being it a Open Source project.
You can download it from SourceForge http://sourceforge.net/projects/zedgraph/
It also has a wiki http://zedgraph.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
A very good or I should say great tutorial is available at Code Project A flexible charting library for .NET
Thanks Binod (My Teammate) for telling me about ZedGraph.
At present I am evaluating both, after some days I will give my conclusion. At this time I can say that both are very good and easy way for creating charts in ASP.NET. And overall both are FREE.