Silverlight Controls, Controls Team, and Testing
This blog will rarely be the place for breaking news, but there are two related pieces of information I want to ensure you know about at the risk of repeating news that has been blogged by others. First, Shawn Burke’s team has announced their intention to release the following new Silverlight controls at PDC 08:
- DockPanel
- WrapPanel
- ViewBox
- Label
- HeaderedContentControl
- Expander
- TreeView
- NumericUpDown
- AutoComplete
- Accordion
Really more important than this list is the fact that Scott Guthrie (ScottGu) has asked one of our smartest and most productive managers, Shawn Burke to create and build the Controls Team (as Shawn explains here). Their new release model is well worth reading about, and they have some very exciting plans for building controls that will make coding in Silverlight that much easier.
I’m particularly interested in how the Label might interact with the PresentationControl, how the TreeView andExpander might interact with data in a client-only architecture and how the new layout controls will change the look and feel of Silverlight applications.
More than any of that, I’m eager to set aside some time to play with the Unit Test Framework they’ve developed that Shawn introduces here, as that may well become a central application building tool.
I highly recommend reading Jeff Willcox’s writeup of his testing tool; don’t let this slip by without taking note.
You’ll find everything you need to get started with the test tool here including additional tutorials, videos and so forth.
Enjoy
-j