They are not very easy to find as they are hidden inside the blogs of Silverlight developers or .NET products websites & there are still not so many resources where you can read about Silverlight.
WebResourcesDepot have collected these free Silverlight controls, components & tools to help making your websites brighter.
GOA WinForms
Use the standard System.Windows.Form .NET library for both Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight. It allows .NET developers to write standard WinForms applications that will run on these two RIA platforms.
AgDataGrid Suite – Free Silverlight Grid Control
This free grid control has data grouping, data sorting, row editing, multi-row selection features & many more.
It is a feature-rich & very professional grid solution.
Visifire – Silverlight Charts
Visifire (see WRD post) is one of the most powerful & well-documented open source chart solution that can be found in the net.
It can be used with ASP, ASP.Net, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails or just simple HTML. Animated 2D-3D column charts, bar charts, pie charts & more can be created with it.
SvLite Effects – Silverlight Dynamic Animations
This Silverlight effects library is currently in beta (& can be paid in the future).
It has carousel panel, slide show, advanced wipe animations, fade animations and more. Animations can be easily configured & support chaining.
Silverlight.FX – Silverlight Effects Library
Effects / transitions in this library are: resize, move, spin, fade, highlight, colorFill, shake, pulsate, crossFade, blinds, slide, and flip.
The download package can be found within the post & there are examples to show you its capabilities.
Silverlight Contrib – Free Silverlight Controls
A collection of Silverlight Controls built by the Silverlight developer community.
Current control in the package are:
- Color picker
- Menu
- Gauge
- Star selector
Controls From Vectorlight
Vectorlight presents many free Silverlight controls including:
- Calendar
- Upload
- Date picker
- Progress Bar
- Treeview & more..
Silverlight Nuggets – Free Silverlight Controls
Lots of free controls that are Silverlight 2 compatible including border, calendar, canvas, checkbox & more..
ComboBox – Free Silverlight Combobox Control
A combobox control that includes templating, data binding, and auto complete functionality.
Silverlight 2 Video Player
A re-sizeable video player with no custom controls. Some features are:
- Supports streaming media
- Ability to autostart & show a thumbnail
- Full screen playback
- TimeLine marker support
Slide.Show (With Flickr Support)
This slideshow can be embedded to any webpage & configures via JavaScript or XML easily.
It can display album and slide data provided by XML, Flickr, or JavaScript & has auto-playback with multiple transitions (e.g. fade, shape, slide, wipe, etc.) support.
Video.Show – Video Community Application
This is a beautiful Silverlight application that enables anyone to create a video community.
All video is hosted at Silverlight Streaming for free, which gives you 4GB storage and 700 Kbps bandwidth via Microsoft’s worldwide Content Delivery Network.
The application has time-based comments, broad media support & many other features that will show the features of Silverlight from the most basic to the advanced level via the downloadable source code of it.
Silverlight Slideshow
A lightweight image slideshow built with Silverlight 1.0.
It supports several transitions effects, has smart image scaling & full screen mode.
Images are defined in a XML file & here is an example of Flickr integration.
Source code is hosted at CodePlex & can be found here.
PageTurn – Silverlight Page Flip
A magazine like page flip effect that works very nice.
Images can be flipped with mouse or browsed via the thumbnails.
photoGallery – Silverlight Photo Gallery
This photo gallery displays upto 12 images & gallery can be configured easilt from an array in a JavaScript file.
agTweener – Silverlight Tweening Engine (Tweener ported)
This Silverlight tweening library is a ported version of Tweener (Flash tween library).
Although it does no have all the features of Tweener, agTweener is still very promising.
Silverglobe – Silverlight Globe Map Control
This open source Silverlight control renders a global map onto a vector based 3D globe.
The globe can be freely rotated in all directions and geographical locations can be added and selected.
Silverlight Examples With Source By Vectorform
The examples below are produced by Vectorform and all of them can be reached from here. You can find demos for each of them & download the source codes.Silverlight Carousel
A Silverlight image carousel which rotates when clicked on left or right and displays the big image of the thumbnail clicked.
Silverlight Video Player
This video player has very simple controls like the play/pause button, sound & the process. It can display full-size videos & can scale to the browser size.
Silverlight Media Viewer
This media viewer can show videos, photos & content from RSS feeds.
Silverlight Slide Viewer
An easy to navigate slide viewer with the arrows on the sides. It shows you which slide you’re viewing & slides are presented with a reflection effect.
Navigation With Silverlight
A nice menu with a depth that has a mouse-over effect for every item. And items are presented with a Web 2.0 like reflection effect.
Silverlight Twitter Widget
This user interface accesses the Twitter API, parses the loaded XML and displays the latest tweets. It also incorporates a custom skinned scrollbar.
Silverlight Tools
These are some free Silverlight tools that will help you develop faster or add a twist to your applications.Desklighter – Create Exe From Silverlight Apps.
Desklighter is a windows utility that will create a standalone exe application that renders Silverlight content that is easily portable and accessible.
Silverlight Spy – Detailed XAML Inspection
Silverlight Spy provides detailed inspection of any Silverlight application.
Use the built-in browser to navigate to a web page. Silverlight Spy will automatically pick up any Silverlight application embedded in the page and display the structure of the application in the Explorer.
Moonlight – Silverlight For Unix
An open source implementation of Silverlight for Unix systems.
Kaxaml – Free XAML Editor
A XAML editor that supports Silverlight & has a snippet gallery. It gives you a "split view" so you can see both your XAML and your endered content.
Do you know any other free Silverlight controls, components or tools? Please share them in the comments.
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