Today, Shawn Burke announced on his blog that Microsoft had recently organized a new controls team that will focus their efforts on developing controls for use in Silverlight and WPF. The team has an impressive roster and there is no doubt that we will see some great things from this group! After the release of Silverlight 2 - Beta 2, I was wondering how Microsoft would be able to continue to ship the source code for the controls since most of them have been integrated into the core product. But with this announcement, it is evident that this organization will allow them to continue this tradition.
So how does this affect Silverlight Contrib? In my opinion, there is very little overlap between Silverlight Contrib and the goals of the Silverlight/WPF Controls team. While Silverlight Contrib does have its own controls, we will try our best to focus on providing controls that are not currently available from Microsoft. Additionally, Silverlight Contrib will also contain API features that are missing from the Silverlight .NET Framework which, to my knowledge, is not the goal of the Silverlight Controls team. In summary, there is some overlap, but I think Silverlight Contrib will end up complementing Silverlight nicely regardless of the controls that are added by the new team.