Friday, June 04, 2010

Silverlight 4 Theme refresh including RIA Services templates

by Tim Heuer via Method ~ of ~ failed by Tim Heuer on 6/4/2010 9:44:19 PM

The feedback from the Silverlight 4 application themes released and the latest in process have been overwhelmingly toward the positive.  We appreciate the feedback and hopefully you appreciate the transparency in the process.  As a developer I want my fellow brethren to appreciate good design and use it whenever possible … even as a default if you don’t have designers on board.

In the initial release we had some issues getting the RIA Services ones out at the same time but we’ve got those finished now for Silverlight 4 Business Application Template. 

Download the refreshed Silverlight 4 themes (inlcuding RIA Services templates) here.

NOTE: If the page still says version 1.0, then refresh a while or wait a bit.  Seems our servers have been having a bit of caching issues lately.

At the link above you’ll find 3 files to download:

• README_FIRST.txt – please read this :-) but basically I’m writing the same thing here.
• SL4Themes-templates.zip – this includes a folder for Expression Blend and Visual Studio templates.  The VS folder also has a sub-folder for the RIA Services templates.
• SL4Themes-rawassets.zip – this is another (optional) zip that includes the resource dictionaries for each template on their own without any Silverlight project.

We had an issue with the VSIX format (VSIX is the community installer format for Visual Studio to make deployment of things like templates a bit easier) and the RIA Services templates, so for now it is a manual copy process (see the README_FIRST file for location).  Thanks to Corrina, Tsitsi and Deepesh for their help in refreshing these templates!

ETA on the new template will be a few weeks.  I’ll post updates of the progress likely on my Twitter feed.

Hope this helps!