Studio for Silverlight Features and Highlights

What's New
  • 50+ Silverlight Controls

    Studio for Silverlight adds over 50 controls to your Visual Studio toolbox, including grids, charts, gauges, maps, docking, menus, treeviews, rich textboxes, scheduler, layout panels, uploaders, and much more! These controls not only fill the gap with what's missing in the standard toolkit, but they add more features, functionality, and better performance over their existing counterparts.

  • Get the Controls You Really Need

    Our suite contains controls you will really use. The suite includes our extremely useful RichTextBox, with support for displaying, editing and printing rich text and HTML content; Chart, designed with professional themes and optimized for large data sets; DataGrid, with powerful built-in filtering, grouping and printing functionality; FlexGrid, inspired by Microsoft Excel for creating bound and unbound grids and scrolling speed 10x faster than the competition; ReportViewer, for displaying reports from virtually any report provider; DockControl, a natural approach to multi-tabbed, docking interfaces similar to Visual Studio, and much, much more.

  • 140+ Samples with Full Source Code

    With over 140 samples with full source code spanning the entire studio you have access to the best resources. All samples install with the controls and are also available for separate online download.

  • Get Line of Business and Data Visualization

    With grids, charts, reports, schedulers, editors, PDF and Excel, Studio for Silverlight includes the core line of business controls you need. And with over 12 data visualization controls (i.e. gauges, maps, carousels, tile views, trees, 3D charts and cover flows) you can create compelling dashboards with ease.

  • Advanced 2D and 3D Charting

    Feature-by-feature Chart for Silverlight is the most complete charting control on the market. With 12 built-in themes, over forty chart types, flexible data binding (MVVM), run-time interaction, rich styling elements, stackable plot areas, and optimizations for large data sets, your charting application or dashboard is just a few clicks away. For surface and contour charts see Chart3D for Silverlight.

  • Display HTML and PDF Reports

    Add report viewing capabilities to your Silverlight applications using our innovative ReportViewer and PdfViewer controls. You can display HTML and PDF-based reports from virtually any report service, including Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services.

  • Excel-like FlexGrid

    Experience the FlexGrid's legendary flexibility, speed, and small footprint. Inspired by Microsoft Excel for creating bound and unbound grids and scrolling speed 10x faster than the competition, FlexGrid for Silverlight provides built-in printing, cell merging, column aggregation, custom cells, and all the extensibility you need for your business data.

  • Complete Rich Text Editing

    Display, edit, and save formatted text as HTML or RTF documents with RichTextBox for Silverlight. Get rich formatting, automatic line wrapping, HTML and RTF import, table and image insertion, annotations, and more.

  • Promote Designer/Developer Collaboration

    Built with XAML, Studio for Silverlight controls promote collaboration in your team and fit seamlessly into your developer/designer workflow. Nearly every feature is designed to work in XAML and code-behind so you can work the way you are most comfortable. Furthermore, you can take XAML from Silverlight and use it in your WPF or Windows Phone application.

  • XAML or Code: You Choose!

    Customize the controls in your preferred method: XAML, C# or VB.NET code-behind, or both. Studio for Silverlight controls support complete XAML markup for most features and dependency properties for data-binding in MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) designed applications.

  • Support for Silverlight Toolkit Themes

    Add style to your UI with built-in support for the most popular Microsoft Silverlight Toolkit themes, including ExpressionDark, ExpressionLight, WhistlerBlue, RainerOrange, ShinyBlue, BureauBlack and Cosmopolitan. See the themes for yourself in our live Control Explorer demo.

  • ClearStyle Technology for XAML Styling Made Easy

    ClearStyle Technology is our new paradigm to XAML control styling. ClearStyle allows developers to easily change control colors without having to modify control templates. By just setting a few brush properties in Visual Studio 2010 you can quickly give a unique look to the control without having to work in Expression Blend or hire a professional designer.

  • Microsoft Expression Blend 4 Support

    Use Expression Blend to fully style Studio for Silverlight controls beyond what ClearStyle and the toolkit themes provide. This allows designers to completely customize control templates for a unique and tailored interface.

  • Support for the Silverlight Analytics Framework

    The Silverlight Analytics Framework enables developers to integrate Web analytics into their Silverlight applications to track all user interactions. ComponentOne Studio® for Silverlight controls support this open-source framework by exposing the necessary event handlers to pass useful information to the analytics providers. Use analytic services with Silverlight to measure your business objectives or goals. Using Studio for Silverlight controls with the Silverlight Analytics Framework enables you to fully understand what users are doing when they work within your Silverlight application, whether online or out of browser.

  • Localization Supported for 14 International Languages

    We've translated and included resource files for localizing your apps in 14 international languages. We provide you translated strings for every ComponentOne Silverlight control for these cultures:

    • Arabic
    • Danish
    • German
    • Spanish
    • Finnish
    • French
    • Hebrew
    • Italian
    • Japanese
    • Dutch
    • Norwegian
    • Portuguese
    • Russian
    • Swedish

  • Break Out of Browser Limitations

    With Silverlight, you can stay innovative without worrying about browser and platform support. Our Silverlight controls work in all major browsers and platforms, allowing you to deliver Rich Internet Applications (RIA) for the Web.

  • Big Functionality, Small Footprint

    We strive to provide as much functionality as possible while keeping our control assemblies as small as possible, because size matters in Silverlight! We accomplish this in part by auxiliary assemblies for advanced features you may or may not need. With smaller assembly sizes overall you need not worry about longer download times. Plus, we offer XapOptimizer as an add-on tool useful for reducing the size of your XAPs 30-70%.

  • Write Once Deploy Everywhere

    Studio for Silverlight controls share the same codebase as our WPF controls and Windows Phone controls. So you can build rich web, mobile and desktop client applications while sharing a lot of the same code. This will reduce development time, cost and eliminate the learning curve of having to learn controls from multiple platforms. You can also use your XAML skills to develop LightSwitch extensions and SharePoint Web Parts using our controls. See our Studio for SharePoint and OLAP for LightSwitch as examples.

  • Active Community Forum

    Collaborate and communicate with fellow developers and ComponentOne technical experts on our free source community forums. See what makes our Silverlight forum one of the most popular Silverlight development communities on the Web.

  • Easy to Learn

    Sharing a similar object model to Microsoft's built-in controls, the controls included in Studio for Silverlight are easy to learn. The suite also comes with documentation complete with quick starts, tutorials, task-based Help, syntax, and more.

  • Unparalleled Platinum Support

    From our 24-hour support response guarantee to our knowledge-rich online community, we offer unmatched support. Our customers are entitled to:

    • Knowledge Base Access
    • Phone Support
    • Forum Support
    Learn more about ComponentOne Support Services.

What's New in Studio for Silverlight 2011 v3?

New Silverlight controls from ComponentOne

The 2011 v3 release of ComponentOne Studio for Silverlight features a brand new OutlookBar control, binding markup extensions, and control enhancements to Chart, FlexGrid, and more.

New OutlookBar Control

Group menus and controls into distinct categories with this side bar navigation system. ComponentOne OutlookBar™ for Silverlight mimics the Microsoft Outlook navigation pane. It consists of any number of categories represented by buttons where each button has a header as well as a panel for adding additional controls.

Chart for Silverlight Enhancements

  • New high performance bitmap rendering mode (RenderMode = Bitmap) for line and symbol chart types.
  • Added support for multiple radial axes for radar charts and corresponding options for specifying the appearance of axis labels.
  • New Axis.AnnoCreated event that allows you to customize appearance of axis labels programmatically.
  • Enhanced clipping behavior when using stacked plot areas. Now elements will not extend to neighboring plot areas.

FlexGrid for Silverlight Enhancements

  • Added ShowOutlineBar property which causes the grid to show a row of numbered buttons on the first column header, similar to Microsoft Excel. This feature was added from the WinForms version.
  • New ChildItemsPath property that allows for easy tree view creation. If your data class has a property that contains a list of elements of any type, C1FlexGrid will show this hierarchical structure as a tree.

Other Enhancements

  • C1DataGrid allows multi-cell selection by dragging the mouse over the cells.
  • C1PdfViewer has been enhanced with thumbnail and document outline (bookmark) support.
  • C1Toolbar now supports Office 2007 and 2010 themes.
  • C1TreeView has been enhanced with built-in editing support.
  • Studio for Windows Phone features four new controls specialized for touch-based UIs: C1ContextMenu, C1DateTimePicker, C1ProgressBar and C1ToggleSwitch.

New Binding Expressions Library

Never write another converter again with ComponentOne Binding Expressions™ for Silverlight. Save time and write cleaner XAML by taking advantage of C1Binding’s rich, inline expression syntax. Concatenate strings, compute formulas, and even apply if/else logic directly in your binding statements without the need for code-behind converters. The C1Binding class is only supported in Silverlight 5.

Silverlight 5 Support

Silverlight 5Working with Silverlight 5? We've just released a pre-release of Studio for Silverlight 5. Download it here.

See the complete 2011 v3 version history for more details, improvements and breaking changes.

Studio for Entity Framework

You should also check out our newest product, Studio for Entity Framework. ComponentOne Studio® for Entity Framework is included with Studio Enterprise and adds ease-of-use and performance enhancements to the ADO.NET Entity Framework and RIA Services. It provides performance enhancements such as fast loading and transparent scrolling over large data sets with Virtual Mode. You can use it with ComponentOne UI controls or with any others. Check out a getting started video to introduce yourself.

What's New in Prior Releases?

Take a look at Studio for Silverlight's release history to find out what's new in previous releases.

Also, check out what's new in OLAP for Silverlight.