Silverlight Toolkit: Support for UX Design
As stated on the Codeplex link, the ‘Silverlight Toolkit’ is a collection of Silverlight controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal Silverlight release cycle.
It adds new functionality quickly for designers and developers, and provides the community an efficient way to help shape product development by contributing ideas and bug reports. It includes full source code, unit tests, samples and documentation for 12 new controls covering charting, styling, layout, and user input. The December 2008 release has some interesting improvements and features that should excite Designers.The features in the toolkit are organized into three categories: Controls, Charting and Theming.
On the controls side, it is great to see versatile controls like Expanders and Treeview available for use in Silverlight projects. Both these controls offer flexible and space-saving information organization capability and are very popular with Information Architects and interaction Designers.
Charting controls seem to be rather basic and we will have to watch if they add to this control set to allow for a lot more flexibility in the types of charts and visualizations we can build. I have not had a chance to actually build some examples using these controls, but none the less this looks like a good start.
What should excite the designers the most is the capabilities related to theming. My colleague Atul blogged about theming a few days back.The Toolkit includes an assortment of themes to make your applications stand out and improve the overall look-and-feel of your Silverlight UI. See the overview on Theming for more information. Some of the themes like ExpressionDark, ExpressionLight and ShinyRed look good enough to use on professional sites. But my own experience of using them was mixed as in some instances, use of these themes on more complex layout of UI controls resulted in the original layouts getting distorted.
Another interesting tool for designers is the ImplicitStyleManage. It encapsulates an attached behavior that propagates styles in a framework element's associated resource dictionary to its children. The class also provides attached properties that allow the resource dictionary to be loaded from an external source.
ItIt is important to keep in mind that controls like Charting, Expander, ImplicitStyleManager and Viewbox are still on their Preview status list and may need tweaks to make it to Stable and then release ready status.
