Last night, I signed on to the CodePlex site and checked in the source code to all the Silverlight controls we've been working on night-and-day. Like an open source ninja! On just about any other team at Microsoft, I might have some major explaining to do right about now.

In all seriousness, Shawn Burke is the man behind open source in the developer division. And my boss. And we've been planning this major source release for a while now. He's the person to thank for having the vision and the passion to challenge us to get this out there for you all.

All of our work is out there now with the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), an Open Source Initiative-approved license, so there's a lot of opportunity for developers to reuse our hard work.

Delivering source code is easy. So we're raising the bar, and shipping sample apps, sample source, plus the thousands of unit and functional tests that we used for testing these controls on all the supported platforms. Download the November '08 release now!

We also deliver a complete data visualization stack, and David Anson has more details on that.

AutoCompleteBox

I was the developer for the AutoCompleteBox control and will be sharing a lot of the fun scenarios that the control enables on this blog in the coming days. This control is a lot like other AutoComplete AJAX controls that are out there, but shaken up and served with a twist of extensibility.

One small example for the true geeks out there: I love that we were able to deliver a searching/filtering story that lets you provide a lambda function to perform your own advanced filtering on the items.

Click to open the live sample project shown above. Then navigate to "AutoCompleteBox > Scenarios > Search Suggestions".

The "Search Suggestions" scenario sample inside the live control samples application actually connects to the Live Search web service, just like Live.com and IE8 do. The requests come back in JSON. And the sample features the AutoCompleteBox control for Silverlight. Clicking through the filenames at the top of the frame you'll see that the whole thing was done in about a page of code.

The proverbial Microsoft blog storm is off to a good start. I'll contribute my own wave of posts here soon enough. In the meantime, there's already plenty of coverage out there.

Enjoy the source. Learn from it. Tell us what you would like us to focus on and do better and we continue to iterate on this toolkit.

Stay tuned.