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Friday, May 18, 2007

Feel the Power of Silverlight Custom Controls Part 2

by Don Burnett

Well there have been a number of things I missed in terms of custom controls when moving from regular WPF to Silverlight. However custom controls that replace this functionality are beginning to pop-up everywhere. I can't wait to start seeing commercial controls.

On Mike Harsh's blog I read that Dave Relyea had released new Silverlight controls, so I raced over there and was totally suprised and very HAPPY... Check this out...

Dave Relyea has released a new set of controls for Silverlight 1.1 (still in alpha) that is news for excitement. He has included a layout framework control with LayoutContainerControl base classes, this is a neat new control that I am not aware of existing elsewhere. You can download the project here.

He also put together a Border control, stackpanel, grid, label control, a Button Control, and FINALLY a TextBox CONTROL..

This totally made my day because Silverlight is now very interactive and no more mixing HTML with Silverlight just to get a TextBox there is now one inside of SilverLight finally.. TEXT ENTRY.

This is very very cool, and really adds functionality to Silverlight that some argue should have been in the original 1.0 silverlight feature spec.

Considering how quickly all of this is coming I expect great things within a year for Silverlight 1.1 CLR based controls. I think there will be a huge market for custom controls because Microsoft is leaving base control functionality sparse.

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