Silverlight Control Contest

I have been playing with Silverlight for a while now and recently came across a site that announced a contest for creating a custom Silverlight control.  I have always wanted to submit something  to a contest like this but never really had the time.  In this case, I already had a couple controls (a custom Slider and a GridSplitter) that I could use.  The catch is that I created this controls for Berico Tailored Systems (BTS), a company that I do some work on the side for.

BTS has a product called SnagL that is built on Silverlight 2.  I helped design the look of the application and created most of the controls that make up the user interface.  Marc Schweigert of Microsoft even conducted an interview with us about the product.  I have been very pleased with Silverlight and in how well some of the controls I worked on turned out.  While many of the controls are specific to SnagL, a few other controls are more general and usable by other applications so I broke those off into their own namespace.  This namespace contains the controls that I was curious about entering into the contest.

I decided, on a whim, to discuss the issue with BTS.  They were more then happy to embrace the idea and provided me permission to release these controls  as open source (under the Ms-PL license).  After some discussions and some research I got the official go ahead to release the source code as open source.

This leads me up to last night, when that final approval came through.  I selected the custom Slider control and created a new project to just include it.  I then submitted this control to the Silverlight Contest, which you can find here.  The contest ends on September 19th and I am excited about it.  Not only do I have a chance to win some great prizes but I am more than happy to share my custom Slider with the Silverlight community.

Aside from the contest, I hope to start a CodePlex project to host the custom control library.  I also plan on writing a series of detailed blogs on how I created each control (starting with the Slider).  Look for those soon.

I just wanted to update this article and mention that the winners for the control contest were announced and my Slider control was, unfortunately, not picked. I guess it just wasn’t flashy enough. I do hope  that it is, at the very least, helping someone else out in IT land.  I have started on that series of article that detail the Slider control and I have posted a project for it (and other custom controls) on CodePlex.