The Silverlight Toolkit has been an integral part of the Silverlight platform since it first appeared in 2008. Now on its seventh edition, support for Visual Studio 2008 and Silverlight 3 have been dropped in favor of recently released Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight 4.
Since the Toolkit is open source, developers who need the new features but wish to remain on Silverlight 3 can backport portions of this edition. Since the components were developed with Windows Presentation Foundation in mind, many of the components can also be ported to that platform.
The components in the toolkit are grouped into four quality bands: Mature/SDK, Stable, Preview, and Experimental. Over time these components generally move up from one band to the next. The best ones make their way into the Silverlight SDK. In addition to the components are experimental development tools for unit testing, code coverage, and automated tests inside the browser. New in this release are
- Charting Stacked Series for Bar, Column, Line, and Area Series
- ContextMenu and ContextMenuService to allow easy right click integration
- Dynamic theme switching at runtime as well as SystemColors theme
- PanelDragDropTarget to allow drag and drop between panels
It should be noted that the Toolkit has also dropped the Reactive Extensions Framework. This was done to allow developers to get the latest version of the Rx Framework.