PDC 2008, Day #3, Session #2, 45 mins

Shawn Burke
Product Unit Manager
WPF/Silverlight Controls Team, Microsoft

Shawn Burke gave a short talk on the new controls being released this week in the Silverlight Toolkit, on Codeplex.

He started by outlining the general strategy for releasing controls toolkits like this one:

• Focus on controls for both WPF & Silverlight
• Ship out of band from major releases
• Ship w/source code
• Fold best (and most popular) controls back into the mainline product

I also appreciated that Shawn outlined the idea of “quality bands”.  Every control goes through a lifecycle, where it passes through various quality bands before eventually making it into the mainline product:

• Experimental
• Preview   (team is committed to it)
• Stable  (equivalent to Beta—feature-complete)
• Mature   (bugs are fixed)

This is great—because the team doesn’t have to wait for the entire toolkit to reach a particular quality level before releasing it to the public.  Instead, they can assess the quality of each control and then make that known.

WPF Parity Controls

Some of the controls included in the toolkit are “parity” controls—i.e. controls that are already in WPF and now being added to Silverlight.  They include:

• DockPanel
• Expander
• TreeView

DockPanel (Stable)

A DockPanel control allows docking child elements to one side of the container.  The last child can be made to fill the remaining space in the container.

Expander (Preview)

The Expander allows display overview and details information, with the details view showing when the user clicks on an expander widget.  You can also change the direction that the content expands to (the default is Down).  The first image below shows the default state—content not yet expanded.  When the user clicks on the expander icon, the Content appears and the icon changes to show an up arrow.

TreeView (Stable)

Shawn indicated that the TreeView was by far the control mostly frequently asked for by users.  It’s behavior is quite familiar—presenting hierarchical data in a dynamic way and allowing the user to expand/collapse the various nodes.

What’s very cool is that the individual nodes in the tree can be basically anything, and fully styled.

New Non-WPF Controls

Shawn mentioned a series of controls that are brand new—i.e. not yet in WPF either.

• AutoComplete
• Charting
• NumericUpDown

AutoComplete (Preview)

Auto completion is a pretty standard feature on the web.  The idea is to do some data lookup while a user types and then display relevant/possible matches to what they are typing.  The cool thing is that the content displayed can be nearly anything.  Shawn demonstrated having a DataGrid show up to display selected data.

Here’s another example, showing some nice styling:

Charting (Preview)

Shawn ran some pretty amazing charting demos, showing charts on a web page updating in real-time.  He said that Microsoft partnered with Dundas, long-time vendor of charting controls, to gain some expertise in the area.

Here are some samples:

Summary

There are some wonderful goodies in this new set of Silverlight tools.  It’s clear that as time goes by, Silverlight will just continue to become more mature and the set of controls will continue to grow—in both WPF and Silverlight.

Original Materials

You can find video of Shawn’s presentation at:  http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/pdc08/WMV-HQ/PC35.wmv

You can play with “live” samples of the various controls at: http://silverlight.net/samples/sl2/toolkitcontrolsamples/run/default.html

Charting samples can be found at:  http://silverlight.net/samples/sl2/toolkitchartsamples/run/default.html