SandShell for Silverlight

SandShell for Silverlight supports most of the presentation capabilities of the Office 2007 Outlook user interface. It presents these features in a developer-friendly package which means these advanced capabilities can be integrated into your application in minutes.

SandShell for Silverlight includes powerful alert components that make full use of Silverlight templating and databinding technologies to make the creation of alerts easy. Alerts can be any size and shape and can host anything from simple text to fully-interactive complex controls. Firing off an alert is as easy as one line of code, and SandShell's queue manager intelligently presents alerts one by one including animation transitions.

Divelements include an Office 2007 theme with the product and ship alternative color schemes with the demonstration application that match their other Silverlight products, making it easy to give your whole application a consistent look and feel. Additionally, the source code for their themes can be examined and changed to give the library a unique appearance if desired.

SandShell Silverlight 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. 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.