Almost 4 month have passed since the release on the market of the Windows Phone devices. With now over 8,000 apps, a lot of code have been written. So many controls manufacturer have release controls for Windows Phone 7. Some are free and some not. But in the end the is now a good set of controls available on the market to help the developer to build nice and appealing application.
Silverlight Toolkit for Windows Phone (Free)
Recently, the Silverlight Toolkit for Windows Phone was update. This release provided some new controls and some improvement on the existing controls.
New feature:
- TiltEffect
- PerformanceProgressBar
Download: http://silverlight.codeplex.com/releases/view/60291
More information: http://www.jeff.wilcox.name/2011/02/feb2011-sl4wptk/
Telerik RadControls for Windows Phone (Paid)
Telerik is also providing some nice controls. Telerik provide nice transition and animation controls. We used some of those controls some of our recent project. They are currently in beta but they are working like RTM product. I had the chance to be in contact with the dev team to help us solving some issue in the beta and i can tell you that the team is really dedicated to provide the best controls.
- Application Frame
- Transition Controls
- many more
Download: http://www.telerik.com/products/windows-phone.aspx
Sample App: zune://navigate/?phoneAppID=fd55f526-d6f7-df11-9264-00237de2db9e
Component Art (Paid)
Last week ComponentArt released a version of their Data Vizualisation for Windows phone. This set of controls looks very nice (i didn’t time to test the control, but i will review the controls in a couple of days). If you plan to create a dashboard with some Charts, Gauges, Maps, Gridviews, etc i suggest you to give a look at this set of controls.
Sample App: zune://navigate/?phoneAppID=e13ba532-242b-e011-854c-00237de2db9e
Download: http://www.componentart.com/products/dv/wp7.aspx
Coding4Fun Tookit (Free)
This open source project provide some nice feature that are not available in any other project. This project is a good complement and a good base for any Windows Phone project.
Controls:
- About Prompt
- Input Prompt
- Progress Overlay
- Round Button
- Round Toggle Button
- Memory Counter
- TimeSpan Picker
Data Helper:
- PhoneHelper for getting data out of the WMAppManifest file
Converter:
- Boolean to Visibility
- String To Visibility
- Themed Image Converter
- Inversed Theme Image Converter
- Visibility to Boolean
Download: http://coding4fun.codeplex.com/
WP7Contrib (Free)
This set of controls provide feature that help to work with MVVM Light. The feature are mostly behind the hood, like Cachine, Messaging, Service and some ui controls.
Download : http://wp7contrib.codeplex.com/
Developing application for Windows Phone 7 can now be done using some controls (without having to create them manually). Those controls provides rich visual and are easy to implement. So creating a portable dashboard for a sale department or a social network application is now an easy task with all those controls. So give it a try, like we did in our projects.
Regards,
LP