The Silverlight Toolkit February update is here!

If you are a new Windows Phone developer and are impressed by all those small but oh so beautiful effects in the Windows Phone UI, it might be good to know that you can mimic that behaviour without coding it yourself.

Stuff like page transitions, progress bars, date and time pickers, toggle switch and list selectors are implemented in the Silverlight Toolkit, and available for all Windows Phone developers to download.

New features this iteration

One thing that has happened since the previous release of the Silverlight Toolkit is the official release of the WPDT for Visual Basic. So now the sample project, that shows you how to use all the neat controls in the toolkit, is available in Visual Basic as well (previously it was just available in c#).

The PerformanceProgressbar is now available in the Silverlight Toolkit. This control used to be available from other sources before, but now it has been incorporated and reworked a bit to be in line with the style and quality with the rest of the controls in the toolkit.

Tilt is a new control added to the toolkit that was previously available from other places.

A lot of bug fixing has been done. Some bugs actually stopped apps using the Silverlight Toolkit from passing the revision to get into the Market place, so these have all been fixed. Then there have been many improvements to the Transitions and LongListSelector after user feedback.

Here’s a short video showing off Tilt as well as the LongListSelector:

Resources

To download the Silverlight Toolkit you can head to the projects CodePlex site.

To check out the full change log go here.

For additional info check out Jeff Wilcox blog post about this release.