SandShell for Silverlight now available

Add Outlook style, task-based navigation and powerful alerting functionality to your Silverlight applications.

Zoom [+]

An Outlook style demo application created with SandShell for Silverlight.

SandShell for Silverlight is a set of controls that make it easy to create attractive navigation-based user interfaces like Microsoft Outlook. They help you organize your application's user interface into hierarchical sections visually distinct from one another, to effectively simplify every task the user must undertake. Divelements include a WunderBar control which exposes a list of all areas of application functionality along with other navigation section and expander controls. The API for this product is very easy to learn and the markup used to create even the most involved applications is simple.

Features

• WunderBar Navigation
  WunderBar is the Microsoft codename for the controls on the left of the Outlook shell that provides top-level navigation facilities for all its features. A WunderBar contains many panes, each of which has a header, an image and some content which is displayed in the main portion of the bar when selected. The bar itself can be collapsed, freeing screen real estate, and while collapsed the contents of the selected pane can still be accessed via a popup. Nearly every feature of the Office control has been recreated in our own control. A splitter which can be used to resize or collapse the control is included as part of its template. The developer can choose to disable its collapsing or resizing features. You can also specify controls to display vertically when the selected pane is collapsed.
• Alerting
  Alerts are easy to create and show using SandShell. A global alert manager looks after the queue of alerts that you display and no matter how quickly or at what time you queue them, they are displayed in order with smooth transition animations. Graphically they can be as simple as a line of text or as rich as formatted output with embedded rich controls that can be manipulated like any other. The user is free to move the alerts anywhere within the Silverlight canvas. Silverlight databinding can be used to define the template for your alerts, then subsequently present any data object formatted according to the template. For example you might have an EmailMessage object and wish to define a standard template for an alert when such a message arrives, as shown on the right.
• Presentation Controls
  The NavigationSection control simply formats its content inside a border matching the rest of the SandShell controls. It supports a header and image which are hosted inside the top part of the border. NavigationExpander extends this control to make it collapsible, matching the sections inside the Outlook list controls that allow you to pick between different lists. Again, the visuals used match the color scheme selected. DocumentPresenter is a simple control designed to show an attractive border around the main document or part of your application. Its drop shadow helps draw the eye to its content.

About Divelements

Divelements is an established supplier of quality user interface components targeted primarily at the Microsoft .NET platform. We pride ourselves on providing solid, robust components that take full advantage of the rich designer capabilities offered by Visual Studio. Our products are recognized across the industry as offering the rich features demanded by complex applications while retaining a simple, easy to use API and lightweight redistributables. Your developers will be more productive using our tools because of the extensive design-time integration. We pride ourselves on keeping our components lean and fast. Their low disk and memory footprint means you will not have to ship a large, unwieldy redistributable with your application that contains functionality that you are not using. Pluggable renderers in most of our products ensure that the look and feel of your application can either mimic the Microsoft Office and Visual Studio products, or optionally be completely customized.