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Some Great Silverlight Controls

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The Silverlight 1.1 alpha bits don't currently have much in the way of controls. The infrastructure is there (you can derive from System.Windows.Control, for instance), and we include a few early sample controls (button, slider and so on, including source code) with the SDK, but the full set of controls won't come until the next public release.

controls In the meantime, Tim Heuer pointed me at an interesting set of controls that have been developed by an organization called NETiKA Technologies. If you go to this demo page, you'll see that they've somehow taken a pretty broad set of Windows Forms controls and implemented them for Silverlight (and Flash). Or at least, I think that's what they've done. It's not entirely clear what's going on under the covers here, since the code you write starts off as a Windows Forms application that the toolkit cross-compiles to Silverlight.

The demos are pretty impressive - a little slow (it is alpha code running on alpha code, to be fair), but particularly the designer demo is a great example of the RIA experiences you'll be able to build and run on Silverlight. Another couple of weeks' work, and this demo could be a real web-based Silverlight IDE in its own right!

In other Tim Heuer news (!), he took the ad overlay screencast I recorded on Wednesday as inspiration for a follow-up Silverlight screencast on triggering events through video markers. Worth a look.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 23, 2007
    PingBack from http://robburke.net/2007/06/23/silverlight-as-winforms-designer/

  • Anonymous
    June 23, 2007
    I would rather different controls... the winform state is not one to be imitated in my opinion people should want to achieve an integrated as in winforms experience, but free like the web experience.

  • Anonymous
    June 23, 2007
    I'm sorry, I press a button and the text and image stay on exactly the same plane whilst the background image changes a bit? How 1996 'non-UI-designer-intuitive' is that! I'm becoming SO bored with all this learn-something-new-because-we-say-it's-wonderful stuff which is struggling to drag us back to the early days of Java's Tic-Tac-Toe demos. $10K to anyone who can replicate ALL of the functionality of our iMunch RIA app by end-July 2007:  http://www.zeepe.com/zeepeapps2/ Dr Sneath, please adjudicate.

  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 26, 2007
    The team has been obscenely busy shipping Silverlight v1.0 and working on Silverlight v1.1 so I haven't

  • Anonymous
    June 26, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 26, 2007
    That's right. There's already a lot of innovation around Silverlight. And I'm not talking about Silverlight

  • Anonymous
    August 20, 2007
    ComponentOne has launched a Demo of Silverlight controls in their Silverlight Toolset! Check it out here: http://labs.componentone.com/Sapphire/