14 DAY TRIAL // The fifth edition of the Silverlight Toolkit is currently live and available for download via Microsoft’s open-source project repository, CodePlex. The latest release of the Silverlight Toolkit is focused on Silverlight 3, and brings to the table enhancements designed to tailor the bits to the most recent release of Visual Studio 2010, which is currently in development. Labeled the October 2009 release of the Silverlight Toolkit, the download comes as an evolution to the last refresh, which was served in July of this year.
“Primarily this was for support of Visual Studio 2010 integration, but also includes drag-drop support for key controls as well as some charting and other API improvements/fixes,” revealed Tim Heuer, program manager for Microsoft Silverlight. At the start of this week Microsoft made available Visual Studio Beta 2 to MSDN subscribers and will open up access to the Beta 2 development milestone for its development platform and tools (.NET Framework 4) for the general public today, October 21st.
Jeff Wilcox, a senior software development engineer at Microsoft, on the Silverlight team, agreed that the Silverlight Toolkit refresh was designed primarily to embrace Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. “The fully interactive design surface in Visual Studio 2010 really completes the Silverlight development experience. The Silverlight Toolkit contains a rich set of metadata that makes the controls even easier to use,” he noted.
However, there are additional enhancements introduced in the fifth edition of the Silverlight Toolkit. According to the changelog accompanying the download of the October 2009 update, the Silverlight Toolkit also offers Drag and Drop support for key controls (TreeView, ListBox, and charting) and charting API enhancements.
“A set of drag and drop targets for ListBox, DataGrid, charts, etc., allows you to add drag & drop support to these controls in a single line of XAML (by enclosing them in a <toolkit:ListBoxDragDropDecorator /> element). Rich LOB-style apps are even easier to build now,” Wilcox added. “Charting improvements - continued advancement of the charting APIs, optimized for extensibility and performance.”
According to Wilcox, the Silverlight Toolkit has enjoyed a consistent level of success. The July 2009 refresh to the toolkit was downloaded by approximately 129,000 developers.
Silverlight Toolkit October 2009 update is available for download here.