SciChart WPF v7.0 Released!

SciChart WPF is now ten years young and still remains the highest rated WPF Chart Control, and best WPF chart on the market!

Today we are pleased to announce continued improvement to our flagship product: SciChart WPF: v7.0. This update includes a number of features & improvements. To find out new, read on below!

What’s New in SciChart WPF v7.0?

Complete Rebrand of the SciChart WPF Examples App, Website & Examples

Our brand has been updated this year and SciChart now has stunning new look on the website. Those who have been with us since 2012 know we’ve traditionally had a green logo & accent colour, however this has been updated professionally throughout the site. The result of a considerable amount of work, our tagline ‘See New Worlds’ is inspired by our customers & users, as SciChart helps them “See what has never been seen before”.

As part of this work we have updated the branding, colours, styles & visuals of over 170 SciChart WPF Examples.

WPF Audio Analyzer Example

Not only good looking, the performance of SciChart WPF is incredible. Below see our new-look 1-Billion data-point performance demo:

WPF Chart FIFO 1 billion points demo

For business applications, stunning visuals come as standard. The new-look WPF Dashboard style Column Charts demo showcases some more business-focussed chart types with SciChart WPF.

WPF Dashboard Style Column Charts

Download the demo installer today to see the new-look examples app. Don’t forget you can also clone it on Github here: github.com/abtsoftware/scichart.wpf.examples.

New “SciChartv7Navy” Theme

SciChart ships with several stunning themes which you can apply to the charts in your application. In SciChart v7.0, we added a new “Navy” theme. To apply it, set static ThemeManager.Theme property to “SciChartv7Navy”. Take a look at the demos they are looking awesome!

.NET 6.0 Support

SciChart WPF is now multi-targeted to support .NET 6.

We’ve kept backward compatibility for .NET Framework (4.6.2+), and netCore 3 apps. Download the latest NuGet packages now and start developing for .NET 6!

Improved Assemblies Security / Signing C++ Assemblies

As part of SciChart WPF v7, all managed and unmanaged SciChart libraries are signed with a security certificate. This has been requested many times, and will reduce friction in security conscious enterprises using SciChart.

SAST Security Analysis / Static Code Analysis

SciChart is used in the Medical industry, as well as Scientific, Defence & Aerospace where security is critical. A number of time’s we’ve been asked about static code analysis and SAST Security Analysis for the SciChart libraries.

We’ve setup SonarQube static code analysis in our CI/CD chain for SciChart WPF to report on code vulnerabilities, analyse potential bugs before they happen and SAST security analysis. We have performed SAST analysis on all SciChart sources. This allowed us to fix many issues discovered in managed code and thus improve quality and security of SciChart libraries and ensure a stable and secure library for use in mission-critical applications & industries.

Improved SciChart 3D Text Rendering

Under the hood we’ve written a completely new, cross-platform, in-house DirectX text rendering engine. This allows us to draw high quality text with Unicode characters, Cyrillic, Arabic or special characters.

We’ve also added support for Japanese, Chinese and Korean characters to SciChart WPF 3D. This has been long requested but required the intensive rework of our cross-platform text rendering engine.

This latest improvement brings you:

• A massive improvement to text quality, anti-aliasing and text blending in 3D charts
• Ability to render Unicode characters, standard and custom fonts, Cyrillic and Arabic characters in SciChart 3D
• Support for Japanese, Korean and Chinese text in SciChart 3D
• Improved rendering via better text character shaping

This work also opens up the possibility of faster / improved performance 2D charts using DirectX powered text rendering.

Added a New 3D Example to Sandbox

Added a new example that demonstrates how to add interactivity to a 3D chart. This is achieved with a custom ChartModifier3D. It allows dragging selected vertices of a 3D SurfaceMesh chart with Mouse.  The example can be found at SciChart GitHub.

New 3D Viewport Orientation Mode

Added support of new Viewport orientation mode in SciChart WPF 3D. In addition to existing mode with Y-Axis pointing upwards, now it is possible to set up 3D Charts to have Z-Axis pointing upwards. This setting is applied globally to all SciChart3DSurface instances. Also, it is possible to change Viewport 3D orientation in runtime. By default, all SciChart3DSurfaces appears with Y-Axis upwards orientation.

To specify desired Viewport 3D orientation, call Viewport3D.SetViewportOrientation(Viewport3DOrientation) static method:

// Change Viewport 3D orientation
Viewport3D.SetViewportOrientation(Viewport3DOrientation.ZAxisUp);

ZeroLineY for 3D Columns

This feature allows specifying Zero position for 3D Column series relatively to YAxis. By default, all 3D Columns begin at XZ plane position. Now it is possible to set Y-Value at which 3D Columns will start:  

This can be achieved setting ZeroLineY property on ColumnRenderableSeries3D instance:

<s3D:SciChart3DSurface.RenderableSeries>
    <!--  To create a 3D Columns Chart, create a ColumnRenderableSeries3D. Optionally specify ZeroLineY, ColumnShape, Opacity  -->
        <s3D:ColumnRenderableSeries3D ZeroLineY="-0.15"
                                      DataPointWidthX="0.8"
                                      Opacity="1"/>
</s3D:SciChart3DSurface.RenderableSeries>

Other Features & Improvements

• Added possibility to disable VisualXccelerator renderer. This is useful in Test projects or in Applications where hardware acceleration is not supported. To disable it, set static VisualXcceleratorEngine.IsEnabledByDefault property to “False”
• Replaced obsolete ExtremeScatterRenderableSeries with XyScatterRenderableSeries in the Demo App. In SciChart v6.x original XyScatterRenderableSeries supports hardware-accelerated rendering and other optimizations. Because of this, ExtremeScatterRenderableSeries has been retired
• Added new unit-tests and integration tests, improved a number of documentation articles, and more!

Bug Fixes

• SC-7072 Fixed an issue that caused a small offset to be applied to SurfaceMesh series position. Also, fixed small gap that appeared between XY and ZY planes in 3D World Box 
• SC-7077 Fixed minor issues related to Themes
• SC-7068 Fixed a silent exception in MountainDrawingProvider with PaletteProvider and VxRenderer. It occured when a color texture reached maximal possible size
• SC-6881 Fixed the issue when LogAxis draw series incorrectly because of precision loss in coordinate calculators
• SC-6919 Fixed the issue when FastMountainRenderableSeries with ZeroLineY=0 was rendered with artifacts when LogarithmicNumericAxis was used as YAxis
• SC-6957 Fixed cut-off digits when drawn with the VisualXccelerator renderer
• SC-6536 Fixed an issue when Gradient Brushes couldn’t be applied to a Column Series using PaletteProvider
• SC-6786 Fixed incorrect Digital Line Series rendering when there are gaps in data
• SC-6527 Fixed an issue in SciChart 3D when hiding Axis Labels would also hide Axis Titles
• SC-6485 Fixed an issue with ZeroLineY property ignored by Column Series with Logarithmic Y Axis
• SC-6584 Fixed a regression issue with FillRectangle() method in the RenderContext API
• SC-6666 Fixed an issue when exporting a chart with Xaml Renderer would cause an exception
• SC-6598 Fixed an issue with dynamically added Annotations on a Polar Chart
• SC-6631 Fixed an issue when a Series wouldn’t appear on a chart when it was checked in Chart Legend
• SC-6657 Fixed blurriness of Sprites with VisualXccelerator renderer
• SC-6658 Improved performance of 2D charts in some scenarios
• SC-6714 Fixed an issue when charts appeared blank when built from Source Code
• SC-6757 Fixed an issue with text size within a Composite Annotation on an exported image
• SC-6755 Fixed a crash when exporting a chart with Annotations in the Demo App
• SC-6879 Fixed an issue when it wasn’t possible to delete a Vertical Line Annotation when used through VerticalSliceModifier in the Demo App
• SC-6705 Fixed an issue with data updates in “Fifo 1 Billion Points Demo” in the Demo App

Breaking Changes

This is a list of breaking changes in SciChart v7.0.

• Minimum .NET Framework Version raised to 4.6.2. Microsoft has ended support for .NET Framework 4.5.2. As a result, we have had to raise the minimum supported .NET Framework Version to v4.6.2 in SciChart WPF v7. SciChart WPF v7 now targets .NET Core 3.1 Desktop, .NET 6.0 and .NET Framework 4.6.2.
• Previous versions of the Demo App are not compatible with SciChart v7.0 assemblies.
  The branding, colors, styles & visuals of the WPF Demo App have been updated. These changes impacted most of the examples and auxiliary SciChart.Examples.ExternalDependencies library. Updated Demo Application, including source code of all SciChart WPF examples, can be found on our Github at this link.
  As the result of these changes, all examples exported from previous SciChart WPF Demo most probably will fail to compile after upgrading dependencies to SciChart v7.x. Please export examples from the latest SciChart v7.0 WPF Demo version or clone them from our repository on Github.

Where to get it

SciChart WPF v7.0 is available by:

• Downloading the installer from our scichart.com/downloads page
• Using Install-Package or Update-Package from NuGet
• By cloning and compiling the examples source code on GitHub
• By cloning or downloading the SciChart source code on GitHub (source code customers only)

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

Leaving Feedback

We welcome your feedback! Please let us know what you think about our new features, examples and improvements. You can contact our friendly, helpful team at any time!