Yes, it’s as easy as it looks. I’m actually just creating this post so that I can test the app I just built. The Silverlight Toolkit has actually been in release since December but I haven’t had the time to play around with it yet. In the toolkit are some really cool components that you can start using in your Silverlight applications. I’m going to need to work with some charts in an upcoming project so I decided to test it out.
Installing the toolkit is easy. All you need to do is download the binaries from the site (or you can download the package with the source files if you want to do a bit of tweaking of your own). Once you’ve downloaded and unzipped it onto your drive, you can add a reference to the dll’s in your project.
Right click on references and select add reference:
In my case I wanted to make use of the PieCharts so I added the DataVisualization dlls:
Also, to make things easier, you can add these new controls to the toolbox by right-clicking on it and selecting Choose Items..
Then navigating to where you unzipped the dlls and of course selecting. Your toolbox should then be populated with the controls when this is done. Note that you won’t be able to drag and drop any of the controls to the design view, but you should be able to do it on the XAML code. When you do that, Visual Studio will automatically add a reference to the namespace and you can start using the control in your code. You’ll get something like:
For the sample, I followed what was stated in the guided tour, but I moved the title attribute to the Chart element. The title didn’t seem to show when I placed it on the PieSeries element:
As for what the application does, it simply reads the latest 10 posts from my feed and counts the number of posts tagged as personal, media, tech, and the posts whose title starts with “Tweets” which are basically posts that aggregate my twitter posts in supposedly a day. I wanted to have a visual of how much I’m actually leaving this blog to the hands of my twitter aggregator :-S.
being in tech 