Ever since joining Microsoft back in August 2008 this blog has been pretty quiet and not just because I’ve been rolling around in the autumn leaves on campus but because of this gem, the Silverlight Toolkit.

At its highest level the Silverlight Toolkit is a collection of great controls and utilities that are continually being improved and polished until they are of the highest and most useful caliber. You can find all the great details about this release over on my fearless leader’s blog and I highly recommend you check it out because beyond saying what the Silverlight Toolkit contains he also explains how it was built, how it will continue to be built and how it will be released in a very agile, very feedback-centric way.

One thing I want to stress is how important you, the developers, designers and those of uncertain vocation, are to this process. Saying your feedback is valuable isn’t just lip service; we are watching the Issue Tracker, we are reading and responding in the Silverlight Controls forum, we are reading blog comments, in short we are listening to the people who use these controls day in and day out.

One of the features I love most about the Silverlight Toolkit is its iterative nature: We look at feedback, rub our brain cells together, roll up our sleeves and six to eight weeks later we have new controls that are ready to be previewed by the community or existing ones that have been polished to a high sheen by your feedback and continued testing.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what people do with these controls as well as what feedback is out there. I’ll see everyone in the forums

Listening To Robot Rock/Oh Yeah by Daft Punk on Alive: 2007 (Live) in honor of how hard we all worked on this release. Worked in fact… like robots.