Telerik drops some Silverlight control goodies

One of the things I love about the Microsoft developer ecosystem is the partner channels that are enabled to create great add-ons to our platforms and frameworks.  Our partners in this space usually get to the better implementations before we do, taking on the task of filling some gaps in unique implementations while our teams can focus on providing the best framework for enabling that construction.

In December of last year, Telerik showed their intentions of making a control suite for Silverlight (then v1.1).  Well now that beta 2 is released for Silverlight 2, they’ve updated their RadControls for Silverlight 2 suite and have now provided a downloadable CTP of the suite.

Their controls implement support for DataBinding, the new VisualStateManager model, Templates/Styles, etc.  Some of the controls they are providing are some that you may find interesting or enhance the existing control suite from the Silverlight core:

• Menu
• TreeView
• Upload
• RadCube
• RadNumericUpDn
• RadProgressBar
• Animation framework

One of their key features is they’ve decided to make these source code compatible with WPF.  The full WPF are not yet available.  You can download the CTP for free right now on their site and view some sample implementations on their sample site.

Telerik is widely known for providing great products and this is really great to see them provide controls for Silverlight that are also compatible with WPF.  I’m excited to see this control suite evolve to release state and perhaps more from the Silverlight team at Telerik!