A Developers Silverlight Toolbox

When developing business application in Silverlight 2.0, you will soon discover that you toolbox is sadly empty. You have of course the basic tools you need with Visual Studio and Blend, but in addition you will have to invest heavily in building frameworks and custom controls, to actually build someting flashy enough to win out there. Microsoft is off course painfully aware of this and are releasing their Silverlight Toolkit and .NET RIA Services. But that isn’t enough.

My intention is to evaluate som of the tools and framework that’s out there and give a summary of what to use and what to avoid.

Silverlight Toolkit

To boost development of Silverlight applications, Microsoft found it necessary to supply developers and designers a larger toolbox with controls and utilities. Silverlight Toolkit can be downloaded from CodePlex.

http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight

Microsoft Silverlight Unit Test Framework

Writing unit tests is a natural way to ensure that your code does what its is intended to do. Unit testing in Silverlight is not as easy as we are used to from ordinary .NET and Java development, but this toolkit is a important step in the right direction.

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/silverlightut

Blacklight (Codeplex)

Blacklight is User Experience focused code sharing project hosted at Codeplex, and is a pleasant acquaintance. The toolkit itself is a collection of controls, samples and visual assets and ideas that I found very handy. Especially their DragDockPanel becomes useful when building a flashy User Experience. But there are also a collection of useful controls like the Clipping Boder, Drop Shadow Border and Drop Shadow Text Control to mention some. You can download both the source and the complied assemblies from CodePlex and view their online showcase her.

http://blacklight.codeplex.com/
http://blogs.msdn.com/mgrayson/archive/2009/03/06/blacklight-v3-0-mar09-released.aspx

Silverlight FX

Silverlight.FX is an application framework for building Rich Internet Applications with Silverlight 2. It focuses on providing building blocks and controls that allows applications to be naturally well-architected

http://projects.nikhilk.net/SilverlightFX/

Microsoft .NET RIA Services

The May 2009 Preview can now be downloaded. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=76bb3a07-3846-4564-b0c3-27972bcaabce&displaylang=en

Microsoft has also published som usefull samples at msdn. http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/RiaServices

This was some usefull linkes. I will update this article with more useful stuff later.