How to display a series of actions that occur over a timespan?

I have a set of actions that occurred in the form of start time, end time:

Action1, 2011/09/04 8:37:22 AM, 2011/09/04 8:38:37 AM
Action2, 2011/09/04 8:37:55 AM, 2011/09/04 8:38:05 AM
Action3, 2011/09/04 8:38:12 AM, 2011/09/04 8:38:35 AM
Action4, 2011/09/04 8:38:57 AM, 2011/09/04 8:39:56 AM

I want to display these in a chart that can visually depict which actions were running at which time, so I can identify if there were periods where, say, 50 actions were happening at the same time, and if that led to a CPU spike (I have perfmon data from this as well, but I can do that portion manually).

I am very familiar with C#, so if there are any charting libraries or controls for this, I can use that with some guidance. Even Excel would work for my purpose, but 开发者_如何学编程I can't figure out how to visually display this.

One way is to use a timeline view like this one: http://nicolas.kruchten.com/content/2010/09/context/ (link to an old project of mine). It scales pretty well to 1000 time-ranges where 50 might occur simultaneously.

Visifire is a charting library which works with Silverlight and WPF (your C# requirement). I think this DOCUMENTATION LINK should be useful in addressing your issue.