Microsoft Research has created a set of components for displaying data in .NET applications. Although the components were originally developed for Usenet Views, a Windows Forms program for viewing and analyzing Usenet statistics, they are generic in nature and can be used in a wide range of applications to show a variety of data. Primary components include a treemap, which is a rendering of hierarchical data as a set of nested boxes, where each box corresponds to one data element; a bubble chart, which displays a set of points as bubbles in an x-y coordinate system; a piano roll, a spreadsheet-like display in which each cell can be displayed in a variety of graphical formats; a spire chart, a histogram display with a column for each week in a specified year; a thread tree, which is a hierarchy of nodes; and finally, a time series, which is a chart that displays multiple time series.

Prototype, Source code