Toolkit posts: "Silverlight in Style," dependency properties in WPF and Silverlight, and TreeView expansion
November 13, 2008
The Silverlight Toolkit site is a great starting point, but a lot of the important conversations that we're having with customers are happening elsewhere: on blogs. I thought I'd take a moment to share some important resources to show you just some of what's being talked about.
Toolkit blogs
Instead of banding together to create one über-blog, we're posting through our own blogs to maintain our own voice, tone, and technical themes. Instead of subscribing to a ton of new feeds, you can just subscribe to the syndicated Toolkit Team blog. Easy. Cool.
The following resources are great. Really great. And might introduce you to a few of the toolkit team members along the way.
Toolkit favorite: TreeView
So many people have wanted a TreeView for Silverlight, it's super important.
Beatriz covers our TreeView control: expanding items (part 1, part 2). In case you find yourself in Malmo, Sweden, a week from today, you should definitely check out Beatriz Costa's talk at the Øredev Conference (her talk is on "Data-driven applications" on Nov. 20: details here.
Silverlight in Style
Mehdi is half-program manager, half-design guru. He's created great coverage on Silverlight themes: part 1 is an intro, part 2 jumps into simple color modifications of the themes that we've already shipped, part 3 is awesome, and then he just came out with this: very crisp-looking Silverlight charts that look as good (better?) as Excel!
Jafar Husain covers the ImplicitStyleManager and Theme Containers. In a lot of technical detail. You can't make this stuff up!
David's chart builder
One of our esteemed senior devs, David gets enough blog traffic as it is. But I should point out that he built a nifty chart builder that is always fun to use. He also has a link listing with a ton of charting resources.
The real gems (maybe not too Silverlight-related) on his blog are:
Silverlight/WPF stuff and Charting
Ning Zhang's blogging about Expander and Viewbox. He also did a nice write-up about dependency properties, first for WPF, and then Silverlight 2.
Justin covers those expected controls
If you're doing WPF development and moving to Silverlight projects, the toolkit is making up some of the compatibility difference. Here's some core controls from the toolkit that WPF developers use every day:
Hope this helps. Oh, looks like David had a similar idea tonight - here's his post that's informing folks about the latest Silverlight Airlines build and surface demo.