Controls

The team has been obscenely busy shipping Silverlight v1.0 and working on Silverlight v1.1 so I haven't had much chance to post lately, but this stopped me in my tracks.  Via Tim's blog I saw this implementation of Windows Forms on top of Silverlight by a company called Netika. 

Having worked on the Windows Forms team for 5+ years I know how much work it was for our team to implement all these features on top of Win32 (especially ToolStrips).  Seeing Netika implement much of the WinForms library on the Silverlight alpha in just a few months blows me away.

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.

In the meantime, Tim Heuer pointed me at an interesting set of controls that have been developed by an organization called NETiKA Technologies.

Dave has put together a great set of Silverlight controls written in C# that include layout containers a textbox with text selection.  The controls in the package are:

• Layout framework
• LayoutControl and LayoutContainerControl base control classes
• Border
• StackPanel
• Grid
• Label
• Button (XAML courtesy of Mike Harsh)
• TextBox

More information and source are in Dave's post.