A comprehensive list to Silverlight Controls for developers

I’ve written a few times about some of the controls that have been provided by organizations like Telerik and ComponentOne.  I figured it would be a good idea to do a larger dump of those that I’m aware of (and hope you add comments to point me to others so I can amend this list) and help make you aware of them as well.  There are a ton of great resources out there for Silverlight developers and I’m always impressed how our developer partners are extending our platforms to make tools for developers (and most of the time better than we do :-)). 

Here’s my round-up of controls (alphabetically – links here will jump to their section):

Cellbi

Cellbi has a library called SvLite Effects which contains animations and controls such as:

• Carousel
• Wipe
• SlideShow
• Primitives
• Tweens
• Window
• ComboBox
• Accordion

A demonstration of these controls is provided on the SvLite Effects site.

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ComponentArt

ComponentArt recently announced their roadmap for Web.UI for Silverlight.  While there is nothing downloadable as of this writing, they do have plans for a suite of controls for Silverlight that include:

• ContextMenu
• DataGrid
• Slider
• TreeView
• ItemFlow
• Menu
• Toolbar
• Upload

Some of their current preview demos are available on their technology preview site for the Web.UI for Silverlight controls.

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ComponentOne

ComponentOne extends their “Studio” line of products to include a Studio for Silverlight which currently includes a suite of controls:

You can explore these controls using their Silverlight Control Explorer sample application.

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DevExpress

No stranger to the control market, DevExpress hit the ground running early with releasing a DataGrid along with full source code.  They have since added more to their Silverlight-specific controls:

• DataGrid
• Rich Text Editor
• Menu/Toolbar Controls
• Layout Manager

These can all be viewed using their online demos area of their site.

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FarPoint

Another familiar name, probably most widely known to Visual Basic developers for FarPoint Spread, the team has seemingly been working on a set of controls for Silverlight.  They are currently in “lab” form but include controls for:

• DateTime
• Numerics
• Mask edit
• Text input
• Calculator
• Error reminder
• Spin

As I noted, these are in lab form, but FarPoint has a preview build available and demonstrations on their lab site.

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Divelements

Divelements has had products for Windows Forms for a while and recently expanded to the WPF and Silverlight space specifically introducing new controls for Silverlight:

• SandRibbon
• SandDock

Take a look at their demonstration of a sample application leveraging both of these products in an Office-like UI.

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GOA Toolkit for Silverlight

Netikatech first showed up on my Silverlight radar with their Windows Forms implementation that was quite impressive.  I had a chance to also meet with the company in Belgium and demonstrate this framework at MIX Essentials.  They’ve since also released the GOA Toolkit for Silverlight which includes (in a few packages):

• Panels: Stack, Dock, Canvas
• ListControl
• Sizers, ContentPresenters, LocatedBorders
• KeyNavigator, Staters, DropDown
• GOAOpen library with full source code

A demonstration of implementing this toolkit is available at the GOA Toolkit Demo site.

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Infragistics

Expanding their NetAdvantage product line, NetAdvantage Silverlight provides a set of controls for developers which Infragistics markets as Line of Business and Data Visualization controls:

• xamWebGrid
• xamWebTree
• xamWebOutlookBar
• xamWebEditors
• xamWebSpellChecker

You can view samples of these in the Infragistics line-of-business feature browser application.  Additionally, they are providing visualization controls:

• xamWebChart
• xamWebGauge
• xamWebMap
• xamWebTimeline
• xamWebToolbar

These are some really great visualizers and they have interesting samples of all of them in their visualization sample application.

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Intersoft (WebAqua.NET and more)

WebAqua.NET from Intersoft provides two controls that simulate a popular user experience most commonly found on the Mac OSX platform.  In addition, Intersoft (as of Feb 2009) has also expanded to include data access controls and an additional presenter control.  They provide:

• WebFishEye
• WebCoverFlow
• Presenter
• AstoriaDataSource
• WcfDataSource
• XmlDataSource

You can see a demonstration of both of these controls on the WebAqua.NET site and the demonstrator for the Presenter and data source controls.

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SilverlightContrib

This is an Open Source project being driven by the community and Silverlight MVPs, namely Page Brooks.  This group of community folks have rallied to create some controls and framework libraries.  Their current controls include:

• Color Picker
• Gauge Control
• Star Selector
• Enhanced Metafile
• Cool Menu
• Zip, Byte, String Utilities
• Animation Tweening
• Wheel mouse listener

This is great to see this community-driven type resources.  Their demo application is also available for perusing here and you can download the bits/code on their CodePlex project site.

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Silverlight Toolkit

Who could forget the beloved Silverlight Toolkit!  Coming from a team inside Microsoft, this is an Open Source project led by a team within Microsoft to provide a set of controls with full source code to developers to leverage, extend, etc.  The controls are:

• AutoCompleteBox
• DockPanel
• HeaderedContentControl
• HeaderedItemsControl
• Label
• NumericUpDown
• TreeView
• WrapPanel
• Charting
• Expander
• ImplicitStyleManager
• Viewbox
• Set of XAML themes

The goal of this project is to provide some extended controls beyond the core that Silverlight provides with the assumption that some of the controls from this project may make it into future releases of Silverlight’s core framework.  You can view the project and sample applications on the Silverlight Toolkit CodePlex project site.

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SLExtensions

Another significant Open Source project that provides a suite of controls/libraries in it’s distribution.  As of now there are:

• Treeview
• Captcha
• Virtualized Stack Panel
• Dockpanel
• Flow layout
• Viewbox
• GoogleMap
• Virtual Earth
• Change tracker
• Binding comparer
• Bootstrap
• HTML Editor

The project also contains a set of utility libraries for handling mouse wheel, analytics, browser history, etc.  Check out the SLExtensions Showcase for some demonstrations.

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Telerik

Another familiar face here in the .NET component world is the great team at Telerik.  They came out early with some preview set of controls for Silverlight 1.0 and now expanded to a solid set of Silverlight 2 controls for RadControls for Silverlight which include:

Check out their Silverlight demo application demonstrating all these controls, various skins and how they can be used.  On the demo page they have also created 4 sample applications that implement their controls in various scenarios: Resume (CV) viewer, Media, Job board, and an automotive configurator.

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Vectorlight

Vectorlight has a suite of controls available for Silverlight 2 developers for free.  You can also have the option to purchase the source code.  Their controls include:

All of their controls and associated demonstrations can be found on the Vectorlight site.

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Visifire

One of the early comers to the control front for visualizations was Visifire, providing an Open Source implementation of some charting controls for Silverlight.  They’ve continued to iterate on their offerings (and also provide commercial licensing) regularly.  They provide charting visualizations for:

• 2-D Column
• 3-D Column
• Line
• Pie
• Bar
• Area
• Doughnut
• Stacked
• Bubble/Point/Scatter

Be sure to view the Visifire online gallery for samples of all these charts!

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Xceed - http://xceed.com/Grid_WPF_Intro.html

Many should recognize Xceed for their previous components in the Windows Forms world.  Well, you may not have known this but they’ve been providing great controls for WPF and Silverlight?  For Silverlight, they have:

• Upload
• Zip

You should really also check out their WPF DataGrid as well that just had an update released (and also has a FREE express version).  It is very feature rich and should provide you with some great value in your applications.  Information about the updated Xceed WPF grid can be found here.  You can also view a demo of their Silverlight platform products on their site as well.

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Open Source and Other Silverlight Projects

There are, of course, other Silverlight controls being developed by individuals.  Here’s some that I’ve found as well (Open Source unless otherwise noted):

Media

• SL2 Video Player (shameless plug): basic and full-featured media player.
• Mino Player: free media player (no source)
• Blacklight controls: media player

Reporting

• Report Sharp-Shooter for Silverlight: reporting component/viewer for Silverlight

Utility/Input

• Silverlight File Upload
• Silverlight Ribbon (CodePlex): another implementation of the Office UI Ribbon
• Web Ribbon: another implementation of a Ribbon UI
• Silverlight Validator: input validation toolkit
• Rich Text Editor
• Blacklight controls: panels, animations
• Silverlight Multi File Uploader
• LinkLabel: helps to implement inline hyperlinks in text blocks
• Silverlight.FX: an effects library for Silverlight provided by the awesome Nikhil Kothari

Gaming/Graphics

• Farseer Physics Engine: physics engine
• Kit3D: 3D modeling framework
• Slide.Show 2: photo slide show framework and application
• DeepEarth: Virtual Earth and Silverlight DeepZoom

Data Visualization/Charting

• Silverlight Dashboards: gauges, etc.

Themes/Styles

• reuxables: resource dictionaries for adding pre-configured themes to your Silverlight application

If you know of more, leave a comment!

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Summary

So there you have it!  A cast of characters for where you can get components and save time in your Silverlight application development.  If I missed anyone, please comment and I’ll keep this list updated.  I know there are a bunch of individual Open Source projects out there (heck, I’ve got my own as well), so if more people comment and surface those gems, I’ll add them here as well.

This is a great list of those extending our platform and making Silverlight great as well as helping you to be productive and concentrate on other aspects of your application versus building something that already exists.  I’m a HUGE fan of buy versus build most of the time – especially in things like components.

I hope this helps!