How do I create widgets in Silverlight?

Question

I appreciate this may be a case of running before I can walk and that discussions are occasionally frowned upon, as opposed to questions

However, I am new to Silverlight and I am keen to not get into bad habits!

As this is more of a general advice typs post, I will mark the most useful information, or link as the answer

I am writing a dashboard. However, I want the areas of the dashvoard to be reusable, basically widgets. Can anyone suggest some good example sites for advice on the best way to do widgets in Silverlight, or any advice in terms of what to beware of etc?

Its the same kind of approach as creating a user control in .NET or, creating a form in Delphi which is then docked into several different screens of an application

The dashboard will need to be customizable by the user, i.e. they see a series of widgets which they can setup then add to the dashboard. Pretty much in the same way as Google Anaytics works

Paul

Answer 1

The quick and dirty approach I would take:

1. Create a silverlight Control for each widget (could be reused on other Views)
2. Place them all in a stack panel
3. Bind the visibility of each Control to a checkbox on an options tab

The not-so-MVVM approach I might consider:

1. Create a silverlight Control for each widget
2. Add them to the stack panel from code behind

Open source goodness:

Note that you wont be able to control the order in this type of scenario, but the user will have the option of viewing what widgets they want to see.

If you want to take more of an MDI approach, Tim Heuer has an interesting project on codeplex: Silverlight FloatableWindow which gives you a resizeable child window type of thing.

The expensive approach I don't recommend:

Telerik and ComponentOne have some pretty advanced dashboard features if you don't feel like rolling your own.