Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit offers developers additional controls for Windows Phone application development, designed to match the rich user experience of the Windows Phone 7.1 SDK.
This toolkit includes common Windows Phone user interface controls such as toggle switches, page transitions, and picker controls. The toolkit has also been localized into all of the Windows Phone “Mango” languages.
Download Toolkit at CodePlex
Download Toolkit at NuGet
Toolkit Features
Microsoft Silverlight is a powerful framework for creating and delivering rich Internet applications and media experiences on the Web. Silverlight 5 builds on the foundation of Silverlight 4 for building business applications and premium media experiences. Among other capabilities, the Silverlight 5 beta highlights dramatic video quality and performance improvements, and features that improve developer productivity.
Silverlight 5 Beta 1 is now available. It’s an add-on for Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 to provide tooling for Microsoft Silverlight 5 Beta and Microsoft WCF RIA Services V1.0 SP2 Preview (April 2011). It can be installed on top of either Visual Studio 2010 SP1 or Visual Web Developer 2010 Express SP1.
Download Silverlight 5 Beta 1
New Features in Silverlight 5
Lighthouse is an open-source tool to run Silverlight unit tests. It currently supports running tests from the command line. This is useful for running tests on the Continuous Build Integration Server (e.g., CCnet or TeamCity).
Future plans include support for running tests from Windows Test Runner Application and from the Resharper plugin for Visual Studio 2010.
Lighthouse on CodePlex
Microsoft has released an update to the Silverlight 4 runtime. There is no change to the Silverlight 4 SDK. This update improves Silverlight network latency by up to 90% and fixes bugs including:
- When you play content for Silverlight by using the VC-1 codec, the time stamp is changed to an incorrect value.
- The Microsoft Visual Studio IDE may crash when you open a Silverlight application that has a Pixel Shader effect in a performance profiler.
- Silverlight 4 does not run on 64-bit versions of Mozilla Firefox for Mac OS X.
- A "6207" DRM error may occur after you upgrade Silverlight.
- A memory leak occurs if a Silverlight 4 application has an inline data template in a control.
- You cannot upgrade a Silverlight 4 out-of-browser application if the application name was changed.
Download Silverlight 4
Details About February 2011 Update
While Silverlight 4 supports accessing COM automation components from elevated trust out-of-browser (OOB) applications, many Windows platform features are currently not available through COM automation. This makes them inaccessible to such Silverlight OOB apps.
Native Extensions for Microsoft Silverlight (NESL) is a library of components that expose select Windows 7 features through COM automation, making them easily available to Silverlight 4 OOB applications running with elevated trust.
The current version of NESL provides access to Windows 7 features like Sensors, Portable Devices, Speech, Taskbar and more. NESL is made up of a set of COM automation based runtime libraries, Silverlight wrapper libraries usable from Silverlight 4 OOB applications, sample applications with source, API documentation, and a developer’s guide.
Native Extensions for Microsoft Silverlight
Novell has released a preview version Moonlight 4, an open source Linux implementation of Microsoft’s Silverlight framework. Moonlight 4 is the first major release since Moonlight 2 was released in 2009.
“Our team has worked tirelessly to get Moonlight to version parity with Silverlight 3 – finally bringing the latest development and delivery capabilities for visually-rich applications to Linux,” said Miguel de Icaza, Developer Platform vice president at Novell. “Now that we’ve reached this milestone, we are looking to complete the 4.0 APIs.”
Moonlight is part of a technical collaboration announced by Novell and Microsoft in September 2007. Microsoft provided Novell with access to its test suites and specifications for Silverlight, and provides Moonlight users with free access to the Microsoft Media Pack, a set of licensed media codecs for video and audio.
Moonlight Home Page
Moonlight 4 Press Release
Coding4Fun has created an open-source collection of Silverlight controls for Windows Phone 7. Controls include:
- About Prompt
- Input Prompt
- Progress Overlay
- Round Button
- Round Toggle Button
- Memory Counter
- TimeSpan Picker
Coding4Fun on CodePlex
Mindscape has released three free Silverlight controls for you to use in your applications. You’re welcome to use them free of charge, royalty free. The three free Silverlight controls are the Book control, Coverflow control, and the handy Expander control.
Mindscape Free Silverlight Controls
Microsoft Silverlight Rough Cut Editor (RCE) is a free tool that simplifies the video editing and publishing process. RCE enables real-time, browser-based video editing by publishers to improve collaboration, manage dynamic metadata and deliver exciting content to the Web.
RCE provides media organizations with a lightweight, Web-based tool that editors anywhere can use to assemble and edit video, audio, images, and XAML overlays with time code accurate control. Powered by Microsoft Silverlight, RCE provides a rich, stutter-free, full-screen editing experience. RCE has an open and extensible architecture, and it can be integrated into any digital asset management (DAM) and any encoding/ transcoding system.
Microsoft has just released RCE Service Pack 1 which includes:
- Support for Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight 4 and IIS Smooth Streaming Client 1.5.
- Enhanced setup experience with automation scripts for Windows 7, Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2.
- Integrated Composite Stream Manifest generator that supports manifest compression and the new IIS Media Services 4.0 manifest format.
- Improved performance and bug fixes.
RCE Home Page
Microsoft has just announced that Silverlight 5 beta will be available in the first half of next year, and the final release will ship in the second half of 2011. New features include:
- Hardware video decoding
- Video fast forward, rewind, speed up and slow mo with automatic audio pitch correction
- Improved power awareness prevents screensaver during video and allows computer to sleep after video finishes
- Remote-control support
- Data-binding improvements
- WCF and RIA improvements with WS-Trust support
- Improved text clarity and rendering
- Immediate mode graphics
- Out of browser applications can create and manage child windows and call P/Invoke
- Automated UI testing support
- Faster application startup
- 64-bit browser support
Future of Silverlight
