~/overview/1.2.install.md

Installation and first chart

At this point you must enable the include prerelease checkbox to find LiveCharts NuGet packages

Open visual studio 2022, select "Create a new project", then select the Windows Forms Application template.

Name the project and the solution WinFormsSample, and select .NET 6.0 as the framework, if the framework is not available for you, you can also use .NET 5.0, .NET core 3.1 or .NET 4.6.2 or greater.

Install from NuGet

Now install LiveCharts from NuGet. If you need more help to install a package from NuGet, please follow this guide.

Install-Package LiveChartsCore.SkiaSharpView.WinForms

After the package is installed you should see the LiveCharts controls in your toolbox, drag a new CartesianChart control from your toolbox to the Form1 class.

If the control does not appear in your toolbox, try to rebuild your project and look for it again.

Now go to the code behind of the Form1 class and set the Series property as follows:

using LiveChartsCore;
using LiveChartsCore.SkiaSharpView;

namespace WinFormsSample
{
    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {
        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();

            cartesianChart1.Series = new ISeries[] // mark
            { // mark
                new LineSeries<double> // mark
                { // mark
                    Values = new double[] { 2, 1, 3, 5, 3, 4, 6 }, // mark
                    Fill = null // mark
                } // mark
            }; // mark
        }
    }
}

And that's it, start your application and you will see the chart in your main window.

Notice that all the samples in this web site use an Model-View-* pattern, it helps us to build the samples for all the platforms faster, you will find through the docs of this site, that we map the series property of the view model class to the control in the UI.

Configure themes, fonts or mappers (Optional)

Optionally you could configure LiveCharts to add a theme, register a global font, enable right to left tooltips or a custom mapper for a type, when you need a non-Latin font you must register a typeface so SkiaShap can render the text correctly, add the following code when your application starts:

Go to the Solution Explorer and browse for Program.cs file, then edit the it as follows.

using System;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using LiveChartsCore; // mark
using LiveChartsCore.SkiaSharpView; // mark
using SkiaSharp; // mark

namespace WinFormsSample;

static class Program
{
    /// <summary>
    ///  The main entry point for the application.
    /// </summary>
    [STAThread]
    static void Main()
    {
        LiveCharts.Configure(config => // mark
           config // mark
               // you can override the theme 
               // .AddDarkTheme() // mark 

               // In case you need a non-Latin based font, you must register a typeface for SkiaSharp
               //.HasGlobalSKTypeface(SKFontManager.Default.MatchCharacter('汉')) // <- Chinese // mark
               //.HasGlobalSKTypeface(SKFontManager.Default.MatchCharacter('あ')) // <- Japanese // mark
               //.HasGlobalSKTypeface(SKFontManager.Default.MatchCharacter('헬')) // <- Korean // mark
               //.HasGlobalSKTypeface(SKFontManager.Default.MatchCharacter('Ж'))  // <- Russian // mark

               //.HasGlobalSKTypeface(SKFontManager.Default.MatchCharacter('أ'))  // <- Arabic // mark
               //.UseRightToLeftSettings() // Enables right to left tooltips // mark

               // finally register your own mappers
               // you can learn more about mappers at:
               // https://livecharts.dev/docs/winforms/2.0.0-beta.950/Overview.Mappers
               .HasMap<City>((city, point) => // mark
               { // mark
                   // here we use the index as X, and the population as Y // mark
                   point.Coordinate = new(point.Index, city.Population); // mark
               }) // mark
                  // .HasMap<Foo>( .... ) // mark
                  // .HasMap<Bar>( .... ) // mark
       ); // mark

        _ = Application.SetHighDpiMode(HighDpiMode.SystemAware);
        Application.EnableVisualStyles();
        Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(false);
        Application.Run(new Form1());
    }

    public record City(string Name, double Population);
}