Practical Cross-Platform Charts and Graphics with ASP.NET Core MVC

From this book, you can learn how to use C#, ASP.NET Core MVC, and JavaScript to create a variety of cross-platform 2D and 3D chart and graphics for your web applications, ranging from simple 2D charts and shapes to complex 3D surfaces and interactive 3D graphics. It offers a great deal of the information about cross-platform chart and graphics programming that is not available in other ASP.NET MVC tutorial and reference books. The ready-to-run example programs implemented in the book allow you to explore the chart and graphics techniques and understand how the chart and graphics algorithms work. You can modify the code examples or add new features to them to form the basis of your own projects. Some of the example code listings provided in this book are already sophisticated web applications that you can use directly in your own real-world projects. This book provides you with a level of detail, explanation, instruction, and sample program code that will enable you to do just about anything related to web chart and graphics development based on ASP.NET Core MVC Framework.

This book is organized into ten chapters. The following summaries of each chapter should give you an overview of the book’s content:

Chapter 1, Overview of ASP.NET Core MVC. This chapter introduces the basics of ASP.NET Core MVC and reviews some of the general aspects of MVC programming.

Chapter 2, Graphics Basics in SVG. This chapter represents SVG graphics basics. It covers the graphics coordinate systems used in SVG, and demonstrates how to create basic 2D shapes.

Chapter 3, Dynamic SVG Graphics with D3. This chapter introduces the D3 JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. It uses sample code to demonstrate how to use D3 to create various 2D graphics objects in ASP.NET Core MVC web applications.

Chapter 4, 2D Charts with D3. This chapter illustrates how to use D3 to create various 2D charts, including line charts and certain special or application-specific charts in ASP.NET Core MVC applications.

Chapter 5, 2D Charts with Chart Libraries. This chapter introduces two charting libraries: Chart.JS and Google Chart API. It consists of several examples that show how to create a variety of 2D charts using these libraries. 

Chapter 6, Stock Charts. This chapter illustrates how to create a variety of stock charts using two different JavaScript libraries: Google Charts API and TechanJS.

Chapter 7, 3D Graphics with WebGL. This chapter covers the basics of WebGL and demonstrates how to use WebGL to create simple geometry primitives and an animated 3D cube object. 

Chapter 8, 3D Graphics with Three.js. This chapter presents the basic procedures on how to use Three.js to create 3D graphics, including defining the scene, setting camera, specifying the materials and lights, and creating geometry and mesh. 

Chapter 9, 3D Charts. This chapter shows how to use Three.js to create simple 3D surface charts and parametric charts. It then illustrates how to use the server-side data to create various custom 3D charts. The chapter also introduces a JavaScript 3D charting library Graph3d and shows how to use the library to create simple 3D charts. 

Chapter 10, Chart with Web API. This chapter covers the basics of ASP.NET Core Web API that is used to provide access to an application’s data. It demonstrates how to create Web API applications and how to use the data from Web API services to create various charts, including 3D surface charts, 3D charts for European options, and stock charts.