The MIX Online team released a new framework today, Gestalt is a javascript library that takes advantage of JQuery, Silverlight and the Dynamic Language Runtime. Being able to use Ruby or Python as well as Xaml in a kind of Silverlight Lite is interesting.
If you're ever done any sizable amount of control development in Silverlight 2 then you'll know that managing Generic.xaml can be a real pain. A couple of complicated controls including things like the Visual State Manager means it won't be long before you're looking at hundreds of lines of xaml that's not easily managed from Blend.
So far I’ve covered building a Trigger “Double Click Trigger” and a Behavior “Mouse Wheel Behavior” so all that’s left are Actions. Actions I believe are probably the most useful of the three sorts of Behaviors in Silverlight, the sheer amount of variation possible when composing these with events provides a lot of richfunctionality to the Blend user. The real power comes from having all this functionality at your drag and drop disposal, by quickly wiring this all together it leaves you more time for true functionality of your RIA.
One fairly useful piece of functionality missing from Silverlight is the use of the Mouse Wheel, thankfully there’s a lot of code out there about how to use the Html Bridge to receive DOM events and bring in Mouse Wheel functionality.
For the most part we’ll be adding or manipulating Silverlight / WPF Behaviors from Blend, but occasionally we’ll need to manage these from code. Overall it’s a pretty simple process. The main class we need to deal with is Microsoft.Expression.Interactivity.Interaction, from here we can retrieve the Behaviors and Triggers collections for a DependencyObject.