Silverlight is a very young platform with its user-interface framework loosely based upon the existing Windows Presentation Foundation. Although the API is virtually identical to a subset of WPF, it is implemented with a very different codebase and the controls shipped with the product are somewhat primitive. However, it is familiar enough for WPF developers to be able to dive straight in and start working. Nobody knows WPF better than the people who spend most of their time building controls for it (people like us) and the same goes for Silverlight too.

Like WPF, Silverlight contains a platform-integrated method of allowing our customers to completely change the look and feel of our controls using nothing but markup, and we encourage this as much as possible. In our SandDock product we ship the source code for example "skins" that completely change the appearance of the product to match that of well-known applications such as Microsoft Expression Blend.

There are no designer tools shipping for Silverlight yet aside from Expression Blend, which does not provide facilities for control authors to customize the design-time experience. However the next version of the "Cider" designer - shipping with the next version of Visual Studio - will contain such tools and as usual we are working closely with Microsoft to ensure that when it ships we'll have the best designer experience available for our products.

Because Silverlight is a web-based platform, it's more important than ever to ensure that the runtimes you depend on are as small as possible. Our controls are exceptionally well architected in order to bring you the most powerful API for the task, but wrapped in a very small assembly.

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