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. This first release includes full source code, unit tests, samples and documentation for 12 new controls covering charting, styling, layout, and user input.
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 Preview Quality Band
- AutoCompleteBox
- NumericUpDown
- Viewbox
- Expander
- ImplicitStyleManager
- Charting
- Components in the Stable Quality Band
- TreeView
- DockPanel
- WrapPanel
- Label
- HeaderedContentControl
- HeaderedItemsControl
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.
- Expression Dark
- Expression Light
- Rainier Purple
- Rainier Orange
- Shiny Blue
- Shiny Red
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I have become a big fan of using Twitter. You can follow my tweets by choosing to follow @joswalt on Twitter. For those that may not know what Twitter is, Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? There are numerous applications out that will allow you to create your Tweets (posts).
There are desktop applications such as Twhirl, TweetDeck, Twitterrific (Mac) to perform your tweeting. Browser addons such as TwitterFox connect you from the browser. You can even keep up to date with your friends on your mobile device through apps such as Tiny Twitter and GPS Twit.
After using Twitter for quite a while, I found myself searching for old tweets from my friends that contained links or information that I was interested in but didn't write down at the time that I read the tweet. I found that Twitter has a search site - search.twitter.com where you can search through tweets. I thought that it would be useful to create a Search Provider for Internet Explorer so that I could perform these searches directly from the Internet Explorer Search Bar.
Here are the steps to add a Twitter Search Provider to Internet Explorer:
- From within Internet Explorer 7, click on the dropdown arrow in the Search section of the toolbar and choose "Find More Providers..."
- After the Add Search Providers page loads, you are going to fill in the Create Your Own Search Provider section. In the URL textbox, enter "http://search.twitter.com/search?q=TEST" (without quotes). You then need to specify a name for your search provider. I chose to enter "Twitter".
- Click on the Install button to add the Twitter Search Provider to your list in Internet Explorer. You are then able to select "Twitter" in your Search section before performing a search.
- Now, just enter the term that you want to search on in Twitter such as searching for a person (joswalt) or a subject (Microsoft), and you will get sent to the Twitter search site with all of your search results provided for you.
You have now successfully added a Twitter Search Provider to Internet Explorer. Hopefully, you have found this post useful and start using Twitter to keep up to date with what your friends and family are doing.
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Continuing my link posting Silverlight Tips, I have been keep a list of Silverlight Tips for reference from the Silverlight team that will help developers get started using Silverlight. Well, the team has released some new tips:
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Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of Silverlight 2, one of the industry’s most comprehensive and powerful solutions for the creation and delivery of applications and media experiences through a Web browser. Silverlight 2 delivers a wide range of new features and tools that enable designers and developers to better collaborate while creating more accessible, more discoverable and more secure user experiences.
Microsoft also announced further support of open source communities by funding advanced Silverlight development capabilities with the Eclipse Foundation’s integrated development environment (IDE) and by providing new controls to developers with the Silverlight Control Pack (SCP) under the Microsoft Permissive License.
“We launched Silverlight just over a year ago, and already one in four consumers worldwide has access to a computer with Silverlight already installed,” said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft. “Silverlight represents a radical improvement in the way developers and designers build applications on the Web. This release will further accelerate our efforts to make Silverlight, Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Studio the preeminent solutions for the creation and delivery of media and rich Internet application experiences.”
Microsoft also will release the Silverlight Control Pack and publish on MSDN the technical specification for the Silverlight Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) vocabulary. The SCP, which will augment the powerful built-in control set in Silverlight, will be released under the Microsoft Permissive License, an Open Source Initiative-approved license, and includes controls such as DockPanel, ViewBox, TreeView, Accordion and AutoComplete. The Silverlight XAML vocabulary specification, released under the Open Specification Promise (OSP), will better enable third-party ISVs to create products that can read and write XAML for Silverlight.
Delivering Features for Next-Generation Web Experiences
Highlights of new Silverlight 2 features include the following:
- .NET Framework support with a rich base class library. This is a compatible subset of the full .NET Framework.
- Powerful built-in controls. These include DataGrid, ListBox, Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar controls and more.
- Advanced skinning and templating support. This makes it easy to customize the look and feel of an application.
- Deep zoom. This enables unparalleled interactivity and navigation of ultrahigh resolution imagery.
- Comprehensive networking support. Out-of-the-box support allows calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS and standard HTTP services, enabling users to create applications that easily integrate with existing back-end systems.
- Expanded .NET Framework language support. Unlike other runtimes, Silverlight 2 supports a variety of programming languages, including Visual Basic, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby, making it easier for developers already familiar with one of these languages to repurpose their existing skill sets.
- Advanced content protection. This now includes Silverlight DRM, powered by PlayReady, offering robust content protection for connected Silverlight experiences.
- Improved server scalability and expanded advertiser support. This includes new streaming and progressive download capabilities, superior search engine optimization techniques, and next-generation in-stream advertising support.
- Vibrant partner ecosystem. Visual Studio Industry Partners such as ComponentOne LLC, Infragistics Inc. and Telerik Inc. are providing products that further enhance developer capabilities when creating Silverlight applications using Visual Studio.
- Cross-platform and cross-browser support. This includes support for Mac, Windows and Linux in Firefox, Safari and Windows Internet Explorer.
More information and details about Silverlight 2 are available by reading the Silverlight 2 fact sheet at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/silverlight/default.mspx.
Get Silverlight 2
Silverlight 2 will be available for download on Tuesday, Oct. 14, at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight. Customers already using a previous version of Silverlight will be automatically upgraded to Silverlight 2.
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Microsoft Corp. today provided the first look at the next version of its developer tools and platform, which will be named Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0. Microsoft described the next release through the following five focus areas: riding the next-generation platform wave, inspiring developer delight, powering breakthrough departmental applications, enabling emerging trends such as cloud computing, and democratizing application life-cycle management (ALM).
Today’s announcement included an in-depth look at how Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2010 (code-named “Rosario”) will help democratize ALM with a unique solution that brings all the members of a development organization into the application development life cycle, and removes many of the existing barriers to integration. Additional details on the other focus areas will be disclosed over the product development cycle.
“With Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0, we are focused on the core pillars of developer experience, support for the latest platforms spanning client, server, services and devices, targeted experiences for specific application types, and core architecture improvements,” said S. “Soma” Somasegar, senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. “These pillars are designed specifically to meet the needs of developers, the teams that drive the application life cycle from idea to delivery, and the customers that demand the highest quality applications across multiple platforms. You can expect to hear a lot more about Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 in the coming months.”
You can read an overview of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 by clicking here.
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As you may have heard from Scott Guthrie or Scott Hanselman, Microsoft announced that it will make jQuery part of the official dev platform. JQuery will come with Visual Studio in the long term, and in the short term it'll ship with ASP.NET MVC. Microsoft will also ship a version of Visual Studio which includes Intellisense.
jQuery is a lightweight open source JavaScript library (only 15kb in size) that in a relatively short span of time has become one of the most popular libraries on the web. You can read John Resig's (jQuery Team) post about this big announcement.
A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code. jQuery supports this via a nice "selector" API that allows developers to query for HTML elements, and then apply "commands" to them. One of the characteristics of jQuery commands is that they can be "chained" together - so that the result of one command can feed into another. jQuery also includes a built-in set of animation APIs that can be used as commands. The combination allows you to do some really cool things with only a few keystrokes.
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