Republished with Permission - Original Article

Last week I did a First Look at Silverlight 2 post that talked about the upcoming Silverlight 2 Beta1 release.  In the post I linked to some end-to-end tutorials I've written that walk through some of the fundamental programming concepts behind Silverlight and WPF, and demonstrate how to use them to build a "Digg Search Client" application using Silverlight:

Part 1: Creating "Hello World" with Silverlight 2 and VS 2008

Part 2: Using Layout Management

Part 3: Using Networking to Retrieve Data and Populate a DataGrid

Part 4: Using Style Elements to Better Encapsulate Look and Feel

Part 5: Using the ListBox and DataBinding to Display List Data

Part 6: Using User Controls to Implement Master/Details Scenarios

Part 7: Using Templates to Customize Control Look and Feel

Part 8: Creating a Digg Desktop Version of our Application using WPF

In this first set of Silverlight tutorials I didn't use a visual design tool to build the UI, and instead focused on showing the underlying XAML UI markup (which I think helps to explain the core programming concepts better).  Now that we've finished covering the basics - let's explore some of the tools we can use to be even more productive.