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What is the Silverlight Toolkit?

The Silverlight Toolkit is a collection of Silverlight controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal Silverlight release cycle. It 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 source code, unit tests, samples and documentation for 12 new controls covering charting, styling, layout, and user input.

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Suggestions? Features? Questions?


How is the Silverlight Toolkit Built?

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.

Controls Example


Silverlight Toolkit December 2008 Overview

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. Read the complete list of changes in the Silverlight Toolkit December 2008 release from the November 2008 release.



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.


Team Member's Blogs

Last edited Tue at 10:33 PM by shawnoster, version 73
Comments
Also available: 6 reviews for current release.

Dewey wrote  Oct 29 2008 at 1:04 AM 
This is better and more polished than I thought it would be.

The charting was a very nice surprise, and gives visifire a bit of a challenge... sweet!

Psychlist1972 wrote  Oct 29 2008 at 3:50 AM 
Just wanted to say Great Job Guys! This toolkit is exactly what the Silverlight community needs, and has tons of things that everyone has asked for. The charting is especially nice.

wdhust wrote  Oct 29 2008 at 4:15 PM 
Oh,this is just what i want.Thanks.

chadcampbell wrote  Oct 29 2008 at 6:29 PM 
These controls look really solid. Thank you for running them by a designer before releasing them to the world. This is some really good stuff!

ManishBHarti wrote  Oct 30 2008 at 5:26 AM 
Controls are awesome!!! Really great.. but one thing which I deliberately waiting is DateTime Picker.

shaggygi wrote  Oct 30 2008 at 10:44 PM 
Really cool stuff released and in future from what I viewed in PDC 08 sessions. Really would like to see DateTime and/or TimePicker, Accordion, DockManager (Similar to Infragistics and/or AvalonDock), and Carousel controls for SL and WPF. Keep up good work.

RonyRizk wrote  Oct 31 2008 at 7:01 AM 
Great Job Guys, I've been looking For Such Kind Of Resources for more than 4 months... Again : Gr8 Job

manor wrote  Nov 2 2008 at 2:27 PM 
Thanks for the toolkit! It looks awesome!
But I am not able to view pages in Silverlight Toolkit.chm, the html help, file that came with the installation? Any idea why?

anjinsan wrote  Nov 3 2008 at 5:15 PM 
manor: I coudn't read the .chm file either. I decompiled it using the HTML Help Workshop (downloadable from Microsoft) and then recompiled it. The re-compiled file is readable.

jeffwilcox wrote  Nov 3 2008 at 7:57 PM 
@manor, @anjinsan: .chm files, when downloaded from the Internet, are locked by Windows. Here's what you can do to make the downloaded .chm work:
- Right-click on the documentation .chm file on your machine
- Select Properties
- Click the "Unblock" button
- You can then open the .chm file, no issues.

Sorry for the confusion!

dutnet wrote  Nov 4 2008 at 5:38 PM 
Thanks for the toolkit. Great work! Did anybody already tried to refer to embedded controls in a Viewbox in codebehind at runtime? I get an object reference not set exception.
Is this a bug?

E.g. XAML code:
xmlns:controls="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Windows.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Windows.Controls"
...
<controls:Viewbox x:Name="Viewbox" Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="1">
<TextBlock x:Name="TextBlock1"></TextBlock>
</controls:Viewbox>

codebehind (CS):
public Page()
{ InitializeComponent();
TextBlock1.Text = "test";
}

vitopanta wrote  Nov 4 2008 at 6:25 PM 
When a TreeView with drag & drop ?
Thanks

ningz wrote  Nov 4 2008 at 8:10 PM 
hi dutnet, please go to our forum (http://silverlight.net/forums/35.aspx) and search for thread "Accessing Controls in Viewbox" (http://silverlight.net/forums/t/45789.aspx) for answer to your question. And, the forum is generally a better place to ask questions and get answers quickly. Thanks.

senfo wrote  Nov 7 2008 at 3:10 AM 
I think it would be cool to add (or create a separate project) some animation affects (a tweener library).

dgearey wrote  Nov 13 2008 at 5:13 PM 
Silverlight Toolkit.chm help file does not work! Every topic displays "The address is not valid"...

shawnburke wrote  Nov 13 2008 at 8:01 PM 
@dgeary - please see this post (http://www.jeff.wilcox.name/2008/11/03/unblock-chms/) for details on opening the CHM on Vista

dgearey wrote  Nov 13 2008 at 11:31 PM 
I'm confused. This is a great set of controls but why are the examples so focussed on xaml? Unless I'm missing something xaml can't be stepped through in a debugger and is very messy after Blend gets through with it so why is the sample code so focussed on xaml. I just want to arrange a treeview on a page and some of it's style and then move to the code behind and do the rest such as make WPF service calls to fetch portions of the data hierarchy as needed, in other words, when a category is expanded, and delete those items when it's collapsed. Can you put together some more code behind samples for those of us who shiver at the thought of functional relationships defined in a super powered markup language. No offense to the xaml guys.

Thanks, Donald

jeffwilcox wrote  Nov 14 2008 at 5:08 AM 
@dgearey,
I hear you! I'm only speaking for myself here, but there are so many people that want to get started quickly: Blend makes that simple, and XAML often leads to simplistic, quick-start examples. I know that when I start working code-behind, I often fall into the bloat trap and soon end up with an awesome application that is really tough to get the mile-high view of.

I think a few of the team members' blogs, as well as http://timheuer.com/ and others syndicated on http://silverlight.net/, are going to be avenues for more involved samples that aren't applicable to everyone.

oschina wrote  Nov 20 2008 at 5:40 AM 
Why there is no discussion on this project ?

http://www.oschina.net

JustinJosefAngel wrote  Nov 20 2008 at 6:09 AM 
oschina, We have an official forum on Silverlight.Net we use for Silverlight.net discussions - http://silverlight.net/forums/35.aspx.

KierenH wrote  Nov 20 2008 at 11:22 PM 
Alot of people scoff that certain controls are missing. I'd like to see the SL ToolKit push the boundaries and not just deliver what we already have. How can we use Silverlight to better present our data and create a great user experience. Some feature requests:
A 'tag cloud', validation controls, navigation, a Vista like breadcrumb, a cube :)

jajalc wrote  Nov 25 2008 at 5:46 AM 
Excellent stuff! This is what we have been waiting for...any chance of some samples on drill down charts?

MDayyan wrote  Nov 25 2008 at 11:20 AM 
Excellent work.

bap wrote  Dec 10 2008 at 1:57 AM 
Nice work, but it's the controls have a SUPER SUPER SLOW RESPONSE when viewing them in the silver light toolkit demo. it seems to take over a second for a response, such as selecting a date from the date control, clicking on an item in a list box. it's at least 1 second before the item is selected. i'm running vista ultamate 64 bit (ie 7 32 bit), 16 gig ram on 3.00+mhz quad core processor.

steeleprice wrote  Dec 12 2008 at 5:27 PM 
Can we please have some samples in VB.
since most of the samples are focussing on XAML, this is pretty easy.
I converted them all in a day, but not everyone has the tools (or time) to do the conversions properly.
I would be happy to submit my conversions.

ManishBHarti wrote  Dec 15 2008 at 6:51 AM 
I am using AutoCompleteBox in my project and it is simply amazing but one thing I'm missing in that is support for accessibility. Do we have any future plan to support this?

jeffwilcox wrote  Dec 16 2008 at 4:23 AM 
@ManishBHarti,
The December release of AutoCompleteBox added accessibility support. Are you using the latest release?

Also, not all web browsers and operating systems support Silverlight's accessibility: I know that you should be successful in XP or Vista running Internet Explorer, and would have to check on any other configurations for you.

Please feel free to contact me through CodePlex, or so others can learn from the discussion online, the forum for the toolkit at http://silverlight.net/forums/35.aspx.

Thanks!

jqgan wrote  Dec 16 2008 at 7:08 PM 
Using IE7 and alway getting a script error on this page and downloading page. Cannot get this toolkit. Is this page broken or my browser is having problems?

twjtaylor wrote  Dec 20 2008 at 12:07 PM 
steeleprice - i'd love to see your conversions, are they hosted anywhere?

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