The sophomore release of the Silverlight Toolkit, today's December release is out. You'll find new themes, a fresh new sample app, fine-tuned components, and a bunch of features and fixes as requested by the community. More of the controls are accessible, the APIs are well baked, and, as always, its out there with a completely open source Ms-PL license. We're also shipping designer DLLs to integrate the experience some, plus unit tests and the latest release of the unit test framework.

If you're using the November release, I strongly recommend that you upgrade - we've worked hard to ensure that we're making positive incremental improvements, and you will find a lot of nice functionality in this release. There are not any new controls in this release.

The CodePlex site is the place to go to request new features, vote on suggestions that others have, and view additional information. We also run a forum and are diligent about following up on your questions.

Controls

The following controls are in the "Stable" quality band, you should be able to use these and enjoy the experience for many releases to come:

• AutoCompleteBox (promoted!)
• DockPanel
• HeaderedContentControl
• HeaderedItemsControl
• Label
• NumericUpDown (promoted)
• TreeView
• WrapPanel

These controls are in "Preview" quality band:

• Charting
• Expander
• ImplicitStyleManager
• Viewbox

Don't let the "Preview" designation scare you off - I am using the charting and data visualization controls on several of my projects today and enjoying ever minute. It was really easy to pick up and learn.

Themes

There are new themes, similar to those you might find in Office and various Windows operating systems. You can view them here.

New sample explorer

We've combined the two sample projects into a single:

The new sample application also supports deep linking, so if you're interested in a specific component, click away!

The links below go directly to the individual control pages and scenarios in the sample app:

Controls

• AutoCompleteBox
• DockPanel
• Expander
• TreeView
• ViewBox
• WrapPanel

DataVisualization

• Column
• Bar
• Pie
• Line
• Bubble
• Scatter

Input

• ButtonSpinner
• NumericUpDown
• UpDownBase

Theming

• Theme Browser
• ImplicitStyleManager

I'll be following up with a few posts over the coming week covering new features, applications, scenarios, and of course the list of changes in the AutoCompleteBox control.

Hope you love it. At this price point (free), I hope that you're able to share this with all of your developer friends this holiday season. Let me know what you think of the progress we've made, and the overall Silverlight Toolkit experience.