The Silverlight Toolkit is a collection of Silverlight controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal Silverlight release cycle. A product of the Microsoft Silverlight product team, the Silverlight Toolkit adds new functionality quickly for designers and developers, and provides the community an efficient way to help shape product development by contributing ideas and bug reports. It includes full open source code, unit tests, samples and documentation for over 26 new controls covering charting, styling, layout, and user input.
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About the Silverlight Toolkit
We use an iterative, evolutionary development model to release new controls and updates often and get feedback from the community to our development team quickly. With access to source code, unit tests and the infrastructure magic we use internally, the community can let us know what it likes and what it wants to change. Anyone can download the source code and start exploring. This transparency will allow the community to help us prioritize features based on real-world usage and actual customer scenarios. We also want to make it easy to reuse skills and source code which is why all our components are designed with Windows Presentation Foundation in mind and the Silverlight Toolkit is released under the Microsoft Public License.
Silverlight Toolkit November 2009 Overview
Read the complete list of
changes in the Silverlight Toolkit November 2009 release from the October 2009 release. The November 2009 version is the 6th release of the Silverlight Toolkit, and targets Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4 Beta.
The Silverlight Toolkit defines four
Quality Bands that describe the stability and finish-level of each component. Below is a summary of where the components currently in the Silverlight Toolkit fall within the quality bands.
- Components in the Mature/SDK Quality Band (The binaries for these components ship in the Silverlight 3 SDK, their full source is available in the Silverlight Toolkit.)
- Components in the Stable Quality Band
- Components in the Preview Quality Band
- Infrastructure and Development Tools in the Experimental Quality Band
- Visual Studio unit test project and item templates
- Code coverage technology preview
- Silverlight Unit Test Framework and Visual Studio unit test metadata for Silverlight
- Silverlight test automation for automating unit test runs in the web browser
- DefaultStyleTask for large control library development
* The binaries for these components ship in the Silverlight 3 SDK, their full source is available in the Silverlight Toolkit.
Themes
In addition to great controls, the Toolkit also includes a beautiful assortment of professional themes to make your applications stand out and improve the overall look-and-feel of your Silverlight UI. See the overview on
Theming for more information.
Latest Silverlight Blog Posts
Recommended Blogs
Silverlight Team RSS feed,
Shawn Burke,
Jeff Wilcox,
Jafar Husain,
Shawn Oster,
Keith Smith,
David Anson,
Ning Zhang,
Ruurd John Boeke,
Ted Glaza,
Brad Abrams,
David Poll,
Kathy Kam,
Scott MorrisonIf you're using Silverlight 2 still, we've also kept around the
online Silverlight 2 Toolkit samples.