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Trying to create a modern, clean and crisp user interface is a challenge – and it’s something that Zune has done rather well in both their software and hardware experiences.

I took a few minutes to experiment with new Silverlight 4 features, including the new Silverlight Toolkit (April 2010 release) that includes a context menu control, to re-style/re-template the menu to look similar to a few other menus.

The user interface no longer uses the antiquated HTML DOM bridge for displaying results, but now is a data bound, rich Silverlight application itself.

As I’ve been developing more complex Silverlight business applications, I’ve been increasingly relying on BackgroundWorker to offload complex calculations and operations to the background thread.

Something I didn’t have to worry about in the typical user interface thread-only implementation of my app was which thread change notifications fire on.

Here’s a few simple tips and recommendations when developing custom Silverlight controls, as it relates to template parts.

In Silverlight 4, more than a year of development went into a modern, improved parser to offer new XAML features, fix some common requests and complaints, and develop a modern platform for future parser improvements to build upon.

A number of expert engineers at Microsoft came together to make this possible, and hopefully you’ll find the improvements worthwhile.

These barcode-displaying apps let you get rid of the plastic in your wallet and use your phone instead. Many airports and carriers have been using these barcodes for paperless boarding passes, too.

The canonical example of user settings is a “Show this welcome screen at startup” checkbox so that your application can offer a nice out-of-box experience.

By writing a simple type with some properties, adding a few helper files, and setting up a two-way data binding, you can store any settings without having to write special code.

This is great for constrained TFS build environments, and although not supported in any way, this does allow you to edit and build simple Silverlight 4 apps created first for Silverlight 3, using Visual Studio 2008.

I’m also including some controls that are found in the Silverlight SDK today. I present these in order of how much I have used the components while building apps.