Creating a chart programmatically in C# using DataVisualization.Charting

Means you have to reference System.Windows.Forms and System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization, even though you might be doing this in a console application. That said, it also includes a set of data manipulation functions, some of which are even finance-specific:

using System;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization.Charting;

namespace Sandbox
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            // set up some data
            var xvals = new[]
                {
                    new DateTime(2012, 4, 4), 
                    new DateTime(2012, 4, 5), 
                    new DateTime(2012, 4, 6), 
                    new DateTime(2012, 4, 7)
                };
            var yvals = new[] { 1,3,7,12 };

            // create the chart
            var chart = new Chart();
            chart.Size = new Size(600, 250);

            var chartArea = new ChartArea();
            chartArea.AxisX.LabelStyle.Format = "dd/MMM\nhh:mm";
            chartArea.AxisX.MajorGrid.LineColor = Color.LightGray;
            chartArea.AxisY.MajorGrid.LineColor = Color.LightGray;
            chartArea.AxisX.LabelStyle.Font = new Font("Consolas", 8);
            chartArea.AxisY.LabelStyle.Font = new Font("Consolas", 8);
            chart.ChartAreas.Add(chartArea);

            var series = new Series();
            series.Name = "Series1";
            series.ChartType = SeriesChartType.FastLine;
            series.XValueType = ChartValueType.DateTime;
            chart.Series.Add(series);

            // bind the datapoints
            chart.Series["Series1"].Points.DataBindXY(xvals, yvals);

            // copy the series and manipulate the copy
            chart.DataManipulator.CopySeriesValues("Series1", "Series2");
            chart.DataManipulator.FinancialFormula(
                FinancialFormula.WeightedMovingAverage, 
                "Series2"
            );
            chart.Series["Series2"].ChartType = SeriesChartType.FastLine;

            // draw!
            chart.Invalidate();

            // write out a file
            chart.SaveImage("chart.png", ChartImageFormat.Png);
        }
    }
}

Gives the following result:

Azure: pretty expensive for web hosting

I can almost hear the response now: No! Really? Anyhow …

I thought I’d take a look at prices for hosting a small website on random vanilla web hosts, and for the same on Azure and Amazon.

Random web hosts appear to sit around £2.49 a month for a small website, at least to start with.

An Azure Extra Small instance costs $0.05 per deployed hour – or a whopping $36 a month. You get an order of magnitude more storage at 20GB, but still .. I’m unlikely to need it.

Interestingly I could also dump the whole site into Azure storage. At $0.15 per GB per hour, with transaction fees. I don’t know for sure, but am pretty sure it’s not pro-rata-d for usage less than a GB.

For comparison an Amazon Micro instance costs $0.03 an hour, or about $22 a month.

Or, I guess I could host something at home from a dynamic IP, which probably fits somewhere in the middle in terms of cost.

At any rate, at 10 times the cost Azure doesn’t look like a rational option.