15.17. Miscellaneous Enhancements

Silverlight 3.0 has a number of other minor tweaks and enhancements.

15.17.1. Controls

Silverlight 3.0 has more than 60 new controls (many originally part of the Silverlight Toolkit); going through them would require several chapters. However, I will tell you that Silverlight now contains charting, docking, autocomplete, time, accordion, and tree view controls.

15.17.2. ListBox

The Silverlight ListBox control now supports multiselection.

15.17.3. TextBox Cursor Styling

The TextBox caret can now be styled in WPF 4.0 and Silverlight 3.0 with the CaretBrush property. This code example changes the caret to yellow:

<TextBox x:Name="txtValue" Width="400" CaretBrush="Yellow"  Canvas.Top="50">
</TextBox>

15.17.4. Accessibility

Silverlight 3.0 is the first browser plug-in that allows you to utilize any color in the system palette. This can assist partially sighted people by allowing them to view controls in high-contrast schemes.

15.17.5. Browser Zoom Support

Silverlight 3.0 now supports browser zoom requests.

15.17.6. Slsvcutil.exe

The Silverlight SDK contains a new command-line utility for generating proxy classes. This script demonstrates how to use this utility: slsvcutil.exe.

15.17.7. WCF RIA Services

This is not really a Silverlight 3.0 change, but I want to make you aware of a new framework called WCF RIA Services. Many Silverlight applications need to perform simple add, update, delete, and call functions, and it can be very tedious to write web service methods to fulfill these requirements. WCF RIA Services will meet these needs and many more; see http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/RiaServices.