20 Interesting WPF Projects on CodePlex (Some for Silverlight too)

In no particular order, here‘s a selection of interesting and recently maintained WPF projects I‘ve found on CodePlex. This is by no means a complete list, so if you have some favorites, please mention them in the comments.

Application Frameworks and Guidance (MVVM, MVP etc.)

Prism

Prism 4 - Released November 12, 2010

Prism provides guidance designed to help you more easily design and build rich, flexible, and easy-to-maintain Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) desktop applications, Silverlight Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), and Windows Phone 7 applications. Using design patterns that embody important architectural design principles, such as separation of concerns and loose coupling, Prism helps you to design and build applications using loosely coupled components that can evolve independently but that can be easily and seamlessly integrated into the overall application. These types of applications are known as composite applications.

Prism includes reference implementations, QuickStarts, reusable library code (the Prism Library), and extensive documentation. This version of Prism targets the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 and Silverlight 4 and includes new guidance around the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern, navigation, and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF). Because Prism is built on the .NET Framework 4.0 (which includes WPF) and Silverlight 4, familiarity with these technologies is useful for evaluating and adopting Prism.

Caliburn Micro

Source Updated daily

A small, yet powerful implementation of Caliburn designed for WPF, Silverlight and WP7. The framework implements a variety of UI patterns for solving real-world problems. Patterns that are enabled include MVC, MVP, Presentation Model (MVVM), and Application Controller.

Caliburn

Release 1.1 : June 28, 2010

Designed to aid in the development of WPF and Silverlight applications, Caliburn implements a variety of UI patterns for solving real-world problems. Patterns that are enabled by the framework include MVC, MVP, Presentation Model (MVVM), Commands and Application Controller.

MVVM Light Toolkit

V3 SP1 - April 18, 2010

The MVVM Light Toolkit is a set of components helping people to get started in the Model - View - ViewModel pattern in Silverlight and WPF. It is a light and pragmatic framework that contains only the essential components needed.

WPF Application Framework (WAF)

Release 2.0.0.1 : Nov 21, 2010

The WPF Application Framework (WAF) is a lightweight Framework that helps you to create well structured WPF Applications. It supports you in applying a Layered Architecture and the Model-View-ViewModel (aka MVVM, M-V-VM, PresentationModel) pattern.

Cinch

Source Updated October 17, 2010

Cinch is a fully featured WPF MVVM framework that makes it easier to develop rich MVVM WPF applications. It also provides UI services/threading/unit tests helpers and much more.

Cinch is a WPF ModelView-ViewModel framework that takes the UI services route to provide a rich WPF MVVM framework that comes with several standard services out of the box.

Application Templates and Window Management

Chronos WPF (I really like the look of this one)

2.0 Beta 2 : November 6, 2010

Chronos WPF is a framework for development of MDI applications using Windows Presentation Foundation.

AvalonDock

v 1.3.3571 July 12, 2010

AvalonDock is a WPF controls library which can be used to create a docking layout system like that is present in VisualStudio. It supports fly-out panes, floating windows, multiple docking manager in same window, styles and themes and it can host WinForms controls.

This library is the successor of the ‘WPF Docking Library‘ that was published on CodeProject quite a while ago (http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/WPFdockinglib.aspx).

Controls and Toolkits

Extended WPF Toolkit

Current Release: Nov 7, 2010

The Extended WPF Toolkit is a collection of WPF controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal WPF Toolkit. It includes controls that are missing from the WPF Toolkit, or that have been ported over from the Silverlight Toolkit. It also contains controls that I think are just nice to have.

Visifire Charts

v3.6.4 on November 19, 2010

Visifire is a set of open source data visualization components - powered by Microsoft Silverlight and WPF. With Visifire you can create and embed visually stunning animated Charts within minutes. Visifire is easy to use and independent of the server side technology.

WPF Chromium 4 WebBrowser Control

Source Updated October 13, 2010

Being able to render and interact with webpages within WPF opens up some great opportunities. This project mixes Google‘s Chromium project, a great wrapper called Awesomium and a little WPF 4.0 pixie dust...

InfoStrat.VE

Latest Source release November 15, 2010

This control provides a WPF interface for the Bing Maps 3D control, complete with data binding for camera control and WPF-based pushpins. All Win32 restrictions (air space control, no rotation or visual brush) are eliminated. Microsoft Surface and Win 7 Touch are also supported.

Fluent Ribbon Control Suite

v2.0 : November 12, 2010

Fluent Ribbon Control Suite is a library that implements an Office-like (Microsoft® Office Fluent™ user interface) for the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). It provides well-customized controls such as RubbonTabControl, Backstage, Gallery, QuickAccessToolbar, ScreenTip and so on. It is bundled with the most up-to-date Office 2010 styles.

Validation Toolkit for WPF & Silverlight

v0.65 : October 29, 2010

Validation Toolkit for WPF & Silverlight displays automatically validation errors coming from both Data Annotations on the View Model and Asynchronous calls to Web Services. The View Model is wrapped into an object that supplies all needed interface implementations.

Perspective - Easy 2D and 3D programming with WPF

V2.0 September 5, 2010

Perspective is an experimental and pedagogical .NET class library for building WPF user interfaces : - 2D controls and utility classes to build skinnable and localizable applications, - 3D controls and basic geometrical shapes (polygons, cube, sphere, ring, etc.)

PropertyEditor for WPF (a property grid control)

Source updated daily

This property grid control gives the same functionality as the VS PropertyGrid, but is styled with a TabControl/GroupBox layout. The control uses WPF binding and supports custom data templates.

UX

Silverlight 4, WPF 4 and Windows Phone 7 Multi-Touch Manipulation

Beta July 12, 2010

Silverlight / Windows Phone 7 behaviors and WPF 4 samples implementing Multi-Touch Manipulation (Gestures) and Inertia.

Themes and Styles

WPF Themes

Source Updated for .NET 4 on  May 2010

WPF Themes is a collection of free themes to be used in WPF projects

Tools

Snoop WPF

June 25, 2010

This is the CodePlex project for Snoop ... the WPF utility by Pete Blois and now maintained by Cory Plotts that allows you to spy/browse the visual tree and change properties ... amongst other things.

Perspective FX: A ShaderEffect Generator for WPF and Silverlight

2.0 Alpha : October 31, 2010

Usually, writing custom graphical effects classes for WPF or Silverlight requires some HLSL programming skills. For a .NET programmer, learning this language may be sometimes long and tricky. The Perspective FX framework aims to help you to build custom effects classes without HLSL coding. It generates the HLSL code and the .NET wrapper for WPF or Silverlight. It produces an assembly that you can use in a WPF or Silverlight application.