This is what happens when two Toolkits fall in love... [The February 2010 release of the WPF Toolkit is now available!]
The WPF Toolkit team has just published the February 2010 release of the WPF Toolkit! In addition to a variety of bug fixes for DataGrid, DatePicker, Calendar, and Visual State Manager, this release also includes the latest changes to the Data Visualization assembly for Silverlight and WPF, bringing the official WPF implementation up to date with the November 2009 release of the Silverlight Toolkit. And because sharing the Silverlight Toolkit's Data Visualization assembly with WPF Toolkit customers has worked out so well, this release of the WPF Toolkit introduces three other controls from the Silverlight Toolkit: AutoCompleteBox (SDK documentation), Accordion, and Rating!
Just as with the Data Visualization assembly, the WPF Toolkit implementation of AutoCompleteBox, Accordion, and Rating are almost identical copies of the latest Silverlight Toolkit implementations - we've even kept the same assembly names and structure. Therefore, everything you already know and love about these controls on Silverlight (including your code and XAML) should translate seamlessly to WPF! Even the Visual Studio 2008 design-time experience for these controls should be the same; we've brought the Visual Studio design-time assemblies over, too!
These controls have been part of the Silverlight Toolkit long enough that there are plenty of great resources on the web for information, examples, and more. I expect WPF developers will come up to speed quickly and be able to start taking advantage of them in WPF applications in no time!
Aside: This release of the WPF Toolkit targets the version of WPF that is part of .NET 3.5 (just as previous releases did). There isn't a version of the WPF Toolkit specifically for .NET 4 - largely because many of the controls in the WPF Toolkit were folded into WPF 4 itself!
Those of you who follow the progress of the Data Visualization project already know that I maintain a collection of helpful links from all over the web here: http://cesso.org/r/DVLinks. Another handy resource for new users is my DataVisualizationDemos sample project which runs on Silverlight 3, Silverlight 4, WPF 3.5, and WPF 4 and provides examples of a bunch of different things made possible by the Data Visualization project. Finally, there are some WPF Toolkit-specific notes that are part of my WPF Toolkit June 2009 announcement and which may be worth reviewing. (In particular, the "Build Notes" section covers an issue that occasionally trips people up when trying to compile the design-time assemblies themselves.)
Release notes: For a summary of the changes to the WPF version of Data Visualization since the June 2009 WPF Toolkit and numerous code/XAML examples, please have a look at my announcements for the July 2009, October 2009, and November 2009 releases of the Silverlight Toolkit.
It's always exciting when there's a new Toolkit release - and a bit of a relief because there's a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes to make these possible. I'd like to thank the WPF Toolkit team for their continued support of Data Visualization and for their willingness to include additional controls from the Silverlight Toolkit. In particular, I'd like to thank Patrick Danino who did nearly all the work to port the three new controls over to WPF, test them, and resolve a few platform incompatibilities that came up! His efforts went well beyond what I expected when he and I first talked about the idea and it has been a pleasure working with him on this. If any bugs happened to sneak through, it's not for lack of effort on Patrick's part.