2 Great Free Resources for WPF Developers - ElementFlow and DataGrid 2.0

Pavan Podilla has added his ElementFlow control to a suite of free open-source tools called FluidKit. ElementFlow is a layout panel that provides several carousel-like layouts, including one quite similar to the "coverflow" from Apple's iTunes application. You can check out some videos of ElementFlow here. My favourite part of ElementFlow is that it has been architected in the "wpf way" - Pavan modified it a while back to be a panel, and it uses templating for specifying how items should appear. In fact in the FluidKit.ShowCase demo that ships with FluidKit, ElementFlow is handling the item layout for an ItemsControl much like I described here. FluidKit also includes a number of other useful classes such as Pavan's drag and drop helpers and an Aero-glass style window.

FluidKit Logo

CoverFlow Layout

Component vendor xceed recently released v2 of their WPF Data Grid. It is available in both a free express version and a paid-for professional version. Both new version includes better design time support, and a greatly increased set of editors (like masked text boxes, numeric textboxes etc) for grid items and the pro version includes master-detail binding. [full disclosure: xceed are sponsors of this site].

xceed logo