Are you aware that Microsoft is providing even more controls than those which are part of Silverlight 2.0? The Silverlight Toolkit is Microsoft's way of getting controls into developers hands (and end users applications) in between Silverlight version releases.

The toolkit was first released in November and then updated in December. It provides 15 additional controls (including databinding controls) as well as some themes for us design-challenged developers.

The controls will eventually become part of the full Silverlight release, but with the toolkit, we don't have to wait until that time. You can create and deploy apps using the toolkit controls and themes today.

The controls currently provided in the toolkit are AutoCompleteBox, DockPanel, WrapPanel, Expander, TreeView and ViewBox. There are also new input controls: a ButtonSpinner, NumericUpDown and UpDownBase controls.

For data visualization there are controls for a variety of Column, Line, Bar, Pie, Bubble and Scatter charts.

To get started with using the toolkit, I highly recommend watching Jesse Liberty's short screencast, Silverlight Toolkit: Introduction,which walks you through downloading, installing and poking around the very helpful sample solution. The sample provides a great UI which shows you the controls and their XAML. For example, here I've selected the BarSeries, and it displays a page with 15 different bar charts along with the xaml and code for building that page.

The toolkit controls have a few tiers of "staging". Newer controls are defined as "preview quality" while those that have been in the toolkit for a while (and therefore banged on by a lot of us!) are defined as "stable" (like a beta) and beyond that, the controls are "mature" which relates to release quaility. Read more about the quality bands here.

Another hint, if you haven't been using Silverlight in VS2008 yet, don't forget to install the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 which you can find on the Get Started page of the Silverlight website.