Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit Released -- Visual Studio Magazine

Onward and UpwardKeith Ward, Editor in Chief, Visual Studio Magazine

Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit Released

Today Microsoft released a Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit, the first since last February. The toolkit features extra controls and builds on the Windows Phone 7.1 SDK, according to the Windows Phone Developer Blog.

Some of the new components include:

An upgraded ContextMenu control
A HubTile for adding animated tiles. Microsoft says it's similar in functionality to "Mango's" new People groups
ListPicker has been updated to allow multiple selection
PhoneTextBox that supports, among other things, action icons and watermarking
Localization has also been significantly improved, including date and time converters, error messages and interface elements. The "Mango" update will support 22 languages.

In addition, the toolkit contains numerous bug fixes and "addresses many customer-reported issues", the blog states.

It's releases like this that should comfort the many developers concerned about the future of Silverlight. We won't learn much more about it until the BUILD show next month, but it's unlikely we'd see updates like this is Microsoft was abandoning the platform.

The toolkit is open source and available on both Codeplex and NuGet.

Posted by Keith Ward on 08/17/2011

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