12 Absolutely and Insanely Essential Utilities For Programmers

Jesse Liberty is a Senior Community Program Manager for Microsoft, focused on Silverlight and Windows Phone 7. He has collected 12 Absolutely and Insanely Essential Utilities For Programmers and listed them on his blog.

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Scott Gu: May 20th Links

Scott Gu has come up with another excellent series of his top links related to ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, .NET 4, VS 2010, Silverlight.
Thank you Scott Gu.

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Silverlight Training Course (Silverlight 4)

A Free 8-part Silverlight 4 training course from Microsoft is established. The Training Course includes a whitepaper that explains all of the new Silverlight 4 features, several hands-on-labs that explain the features, and a 8 unit course for building business applications with Silverlight 4. The business applications course includes 8 modules with extensive hands on labs as well as 25 accompanying videos that walk you through key aspects of building a business application with Silverlight. Key aspects in this course are working with numerous sandboxed and elevated out of browser features, the new RichTextBox control, implicit styling, webcam, drag and drop, multi touch, validation, authentication, MEF, WCF RIA Services, right mouse click, and much more!

http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/Silverlight4/

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Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate

VS2010 RC  is available to MSDN subscribers on Monday, February 8th, with general availability on February 10th.

Release Candidate Highlights

	MSDN Subscribers: Download the Release Candidate
	Featured Overviews and Walkthroughs Check out this diverse collection of walkthroughs for RC. They provide step-by-step instructions for common scenarios and are a good place to start.

Please note: The Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 RC release does not support Silverlight 4 development. If you are developing a Silverlight 4 application you should continue to use Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2.

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Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Launch Date

Microsoft has announced that the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 will launch on Monday, 12 April 2010.
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Silverlight From Zero

Starts:	Wednesday February 17, 2010, 11:00AM Pacific Time
Ends:	Wednesday February 17, 2010, 12:30PM Pacific Time
Event Type:	Training/Seminar
Location:	This is a virtual event.
Website:	https://www112.livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft/join?id=G2K4BH&role=attend&pw=PN6.%3CQ]rb
Intended For:	Developers, Architects.
Organization:	LIDNUG

Jesse Liberty, Silverlight Geek, is a Community Program Manager for Silverlight at Microsoft, and author of a dozen books on .NET programming. His presentation, Silverlight From Zero, assumes you are a programmer who wants to learn Silverlight fundamentals fast. In this high speed technical presentation Liberty will cover: What is it and how do I get it and why do I want it?, Xaml and Code, Silveright controls, transforms and animation, templates, the Visual state Manager, Data and Databinding, Data Validation and the basics of media.
Note: This event is PST (Pacific Time)

Register...

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Free Silverlight Controls And Tools For Brighter Websites

Silverlight, which is used in more websites everyday, has several beautiful free controls, components & tools that will help you develop websites faster & better.
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.
Thanks to and taken from...

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