Silverlight 4 Ships Today - With New Toolkit and Improved DataGrid

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Silverlight 4 released today, and with it came a new version of the Silverlight Toolkit and several improvements to the DataGrid control.

Silverlight 4

See what’s new for line of business applications in Silverlight 4 in my presentation.  Also for more information about Silverlight 4 you can check out the FAQ.

Get the bits here: https://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/

New Toolkit Release

There is also a new release of the Silverlight Toolkit which you can get here.

What’s New

New Charting Stacked Series for Bar, Column, Line, and Area Series

New ContextMenu and ContextMenuService to allow easy right click integration

New Dynamic theme switching at runtime as well as SystemColors theme

New PanelDragDropTarget to allow drag and drop between panels

All toolkit controls can be found under a single common “toolkit” prefix when added from the Toolbox

Ignite improvements to allow for cross-platform support

DataGrid Improvements

The DataGrid continues to improve with every release and Silverlight 4 was no exception.

Star Sized Columns

The DataGrid’s columns can already auto-size to their contents, or be set to a fixed numerical value.  In Silverlight 4, they now can be set to * widths like the Grid layout panel.  This allows one or more columns to take up the remaining width of the DataGrid eliminating the need for a horizontal scrollbar or filler column.  We also spent a lot of time getting the resizing behavior just right so that resizing a mixture of star and non-star width columns behaves naturally.

Improved Validation Support

Silverlight 4 moved validation forward beyond the exception based model of Silverlight 3 by introducing the IDataErrorInfo and INotifyDataErrorInfo validation interfaces.  The DataGrid knows how to automatically work with these interfaces, and introduces better cross-field error handling allowing users to move between invalid cells in a row when working with objects that implement these interfaces.

Row-level Copy

Now when a user selects a row they can copy it to the clipboard and paste the contents into other applications such as Microsoft Excel.  We also introduced several ways to customize the behavior including ClipboardBindings to control the data that goes on the clipboard and a copy mode that controls if headers should be copied, or if copying should be allowed at all.

Mouse Wheel Scrolling

Users can now scroll through a DataGrid’s contents using the mouse wheel.

RTL Support

Silverlight 4 introduced bi-directional text support, and the DataGrid works as expected when the FlowDirection is set RightToLeft.

 

Add to this the Row Grouping that we added in Silverlight 3 and all of the great features from Silverlight 2 and we hope that you’ll agree that the DataGrid is a pretty powerful tool!