Announcing the release of our latest Silverlight Toolkit: March 2009 edition.

I just checked when I blogged last and that was in December 2008, when we released the December edition. Since then I have not posted a single thing…  You can be sure that it was because I was hard at work on the toolkit. In it, has gone an enormous amount of work by the team to stabilize code, add new features, provide an actual installer, hugely improve the design time experience using either Blend or Visual Studio and actually create VB samples for our sample app!
If you have SL3 installed, do check out the changelist that has quite a few inline ‘live’ samples.

Also, since you now have SL3 installed anyway, go and look at our sample application, which showcases the controls.

There are six new controls: Accordion, DomainUpDown, LayoutTransformer, TimePicker, TimeUpDown, TransitioningContentControl, and you will be able to blame me for any and all bugs that you find in 5 of those.

(Well, please blame Justin Angel as well, I worked closely with him on these controls and he sure does like it a lot when I share credit).

Let’s take a quick look at my controls. In the coming days, you can expect in-depth posts about all of them. I am planning on going into the design issues as well and am going to point out areas that might change in the future. I’m even going to ‘hint’ at some of the features you just might want to vote on!

DomainUpDown

Live sample here.

This control won’t win the award for being the most creative control in the world, but looks can be deceiving. Think of it as a ComboBox without the popup, and you’ll understand what I mean. A more technical description would be: an UpDown control with an ItemTemplate.

DomainUpDown (DUD) allows you to show a collection of items and iterate over them. It allows you to set an itemtemplate to style them and it features an up and down arrow. Finally, it has an ‘edit’ mode, which will bring you back to a TextBox where you can type.

So, let’s say you have a domain of ‘Red’, ‘Green’ and ‘Blue’, you can visualize these any way you want (using the ItemTemplate) and the user could type ‘Green’ to jump to that item or use the ButtonSpinner to get there.

DUD is useful in numerous situations, like in mobile devices but also in visualizing data that you would like the user to ‘browse’ through, such as a slide show.

Accordion

Live sample here.

Accordion is a hugely requested control and I really hope many will find it useful in their day-to-day work. (Please send me samples of how you are using accordion in a creative way!)

An accordion is a control that presents multiple pieces of content and lets the user collapse/expands those. You use accordions everyday, for instance in Outlook.

Highlights of Accordion are:

• allows multiselection (expanding multiple items)
• has different selection modes (you can force that a minimum of one item is ‘open’)
• open/close animation is a VSM state so very easily configured in blend
• allows sequential animations (say the user selects an item, we will first close the old one and then open the selected item)
• different expand directions (left/right/up/down)
• can fill space or take the space it needs

The sample application has a little dashboard that lets you play with different settings.

There are a lot of exciting applications for a control like this and I will surely be blogging about Accordion with more details soon.

TimeUpDown

Live sample is here.

A TimeUpDown is TextBox with two spinners, allowing you to use the mouse (or keyboard) to easily set a time.

Without a doubt TimeUpDown and it’s friend TimePicker are the most complex controls of the bunch. There is a lot of functionality here that hopefully makes it really easy for end users to select a time.
The big feature is that the controls are completely globalizable, through many extension points. Arabic was easy to implement:

Noteworthy features are:

• contextual spinning: the control is aware of the caret position and will spin accordingly. So you could spin in 10 minute intervals, or in 1 minute intervals, based on the location of the cursor
• likewise, if you have a defined a minimum or maximum to the control, the possibilities of the spinner are determined by your caret position (you might not be allowed to increment by an hour, although if you move the cursor to the minutes, you can increment minutes still)
• you can set a culture
• you can set the TimeFormat used to format the string, as either Short, Long or custom. In the latter case you can define the format your self, the former cases will rely on the defined culture
• there is a strategy class that handles all the globalization. Almost all methods are protected virtuals, just waiting for you to implement Klingon culture!
• an extensible TimeParsing mechanism, allowing you to write small parsing classes that make sense in your business. Maybe you want your users to be able to write ‘now’ and have it parse to DateTime.Now?? Can do!
• out of the box ‘catch-all’ parser, which tries to be as smart as possible when it comes to parsing your time. It allows you to write 1234 and parse it to 12:34. Or 9p and parse to 9:00 PM.
• intellisense-like experience (balloon) that guides users into entering a correct time

Getting the experience of entering time just right is extremely important to us, so we are actively looking into making the experience even better. The balloon is one of those ideas that I absolutely love. See what I mean:

We will hopefully make incremental steps and are actively looking for your feedback.

TimePicker

Live sample is here.

TimePicker uses a TimeUpDown and combines it with the possibility of picking a time through a Popup. We ship with two popups:

The ever useful ListTimePickerPopup:

And the often overlooked RangeTimePickerPopup:

You can expect us to come up with a few different pickers in the coming releases, but yet again, I would love your feedback on what a good picker is.

The popups can be used as standalone controls as well.

TransitionContentControl

Live sample is here.

This control is in the experimental band. That translates into: don’t touch, just look. The API for this control is most likely going to change significantly. The only reason we publish it, is to get feedback. We want to know if you find these class of controls useful. It is not production quality.

I’ve blogged about the ideas behind this control extensively. A TransitionContentControl can be used as any other ContentControl: it just renders the content you give it to the screen. However, when you set different content to it (it inherits from ContentControl, so just set the Content property, like you are accustomed to), it will not immediately remove the content currently shown on the screen.
Instead, it will start an animation (VSM based) that will transition the ‘old’ content out and the ‘new’ content in. For instance, a fade in/out.

As such, it can be used anywhere where you would normally use a content control.

Most importantly, the API allows you to set the name of the transition you wish to play. So, you might have retemplated the control and added an ‘up’ and ‘down’ vsm state to the presentationgroup. By just setting the Transition property to those names (strings) you can control how the content is transitioned.
So, for instance, a DomainUpDown could use this control and define those states. Then, when the Up button is hit, the Up transition would be triggered. When the Down button is hit, the Down transition would be used.

My team mate Mehdi created some great visual transitions for content and used it in conjunction with the DomainUpDown.

The value of the control is squarely in making it easy for you to drop in a ContentControl that can do transitions, instead of having to write this code by your self again and again.

Warning: Since the control will keep the old element alive in the visual tree for some undetermined amount of time (the time it takes to transition), you should not use the control with UIElements.
That could easily give you a well-deserved exception.

More to follow soon!