Another great post by Jesse Libery. He's been showing us how to create custom controls in Silverlight, he's explained the Silverlight Dependency Properties (which now closely resemble WPF Dependency Properties) and now he's going to dig into how the control conveys its visual contract to the Visual State Manager. The VSM provides an easy way to skin your controls because you simply define a couple of states and specify how your control looks in each of those.

According to Jesse himself he's not going to elaborate any further, we'll just have to wait for his level 300-400 video-tutorials...

I have to confess, this is what I really like about custom controls; the closer you look, the more there is to see. That said, I think we've gone about as far as we can without exploring this in a video, so I'll turn my attention in coming blog posts to some other emerging features.

Another great series of articles on CodeProject. This one has been on since spring this year, but somehow I had missed it. Pity, since it's pretty good. It shows how to develop your own diagram drawing tool. The first part kicks off by explaining how you could make those cool handles for resizing and rotating objects!

WPF Diagram Design Part 1
WPF Diagram Design Part 2
WPF Diagram Design Part 3
WPF Diagram Design Part 4

These Glossy Controls for Silverlight 2 look pretty awesome. It's also a hell of a first blogpost for Dave!

If we have to believe Jesse Liberty, we can expect an
awful lot of tutorials coming from him for Silverlight in the coming months. He talks about recording 75 level 300-400 video tutorials per year! That's quite a lot actually :)

Karl has been busy and released XAML PowerToys 3.1.0.2. This version includes Silverlight 2 support! In case you don't know what I'm talking about:

XAML Power Toys is a multi-AppDomain Visual Studio Add-In for WPF and Silverlight developers that provides features to Visual Studio to enhance the XAML editing experience and the laying out of forms, DataGrids, ListViews.