I would like to add stock charting to my trading program. I am not a GUI person, does anyone know what are the good stock charting libraries out there? If I want to learn how to develop a stock chart, what are the things I need to know. My primary developing language is C#, but I code server side Java for a living.

I'm also a server-side Java programmer who has written a custom trading program in C#. I've also added charting to my software. I investigated a number of commercial packages, but none of them could handle weekends along the horizontal axis, believe it or not. You either had big blank spaces where Saturday and Sunday were, or you had to do a ton of custom coding to handle that situation. I ended up using the open source ZedGraph library, which worked pretty well. It did not have candlestick charting built in, but I posted a question about it on the ZedGraph web site's forum, and the original author responded almost immediately with a simple way to do candlesticks. It's possible that a newer version of ZedGraph has candlesticks built it. If not, and you can't find the post where he answered my question about how to do, send me a private message and I'll look at my code and remind myself how I did it.

Jim

You might try http://www.advsofteng.com/finance_demo.html. I've used it in my own application. I think other commercial apps use it as well, based upon how it looks. It handles quite a number of different languages through language wrapping layer.

It handles the weekend gap issue simply by compressing the whole time axis, so if there is a bar missing, it doesn't gap it, it simply draws the next one at that location. It may cause issues for when one is missing bars mid-day, but that can be programmed around by using a slightly more complicated 'missing bar fill algorithm'.

It also does candlesticks.

You get the whole package, no strings attached, in the download. Welll one minor string, you get their name unobtrusively at the bottom of each chart. By paying what appears to be a reasonable price, you can get the company name removed.