Located in the System.Windows namespace for the most part WPF exists as a subset of .NET Framework. WPF programming experience should be familiar if one has previously built applications with .NET Framework using ASP.NET and Windows Forms. What you can do is you can set properties, handle events, instantiate classes, all using C# or Visual Basic.

WPF includes additional programming constructs to support some of the more powerful WPF capabilities that enhance properties and events: dependency properties, experience and routed events all to simplify the programming.

A popular WPF chart application that makes programming look and feel like child play is SciChart, which helps developers create the fastest and best WPF charts from big data volumes.

WPF Chart Performance seems really important to SciChart. Quote from them:

We strive to have the best, and the fastest WPF Chart components in the world, but how do we demonstrate what we’ve achieved vs. our competitors to would-be customers?
We’ve created an application which measures our WPF Chart Performance in a number of scenarios, such as line, scatter, scrolling-line and many-series scenarios. The tests are designed to really stress the chart control and find it’s limits.

There there are several factors which influence overall performance of a WPF Chart Control. Such as:

Number of Series in the chart
Types of Series (e.g. Line, Scatter, Area, Candlestick)
Number of data-points per series
Rate of change of data (number of points appended or removed per second)
Thickness of pens / number of pixels filled
Size of the chart viewport on screen
Number of transformations between data & pixel coordinates per second
Any additional calculations like Logarithmic Axis scaling or Auto Ranging
These are reflected in the test cases and show stress on different areas of the renderer.