Is the June 2009 WPF Toolkit Safe to Use in Applications that will be Shipped Out to Customers?

Question

Is the June 2009 WPF Toolkit safe to use in applications that will be shipped out to customers?

I'm seriously concerned that my application will crash three days prior to release. This concern stems from the fact that that the WPF Toolkit does not seem to be endorsed by Microsoft, even though it appears to be developed by established developers on Microsoft's WPF team.

I'd like to think that I can trust these official WPF developers to make sure their stuff won't cause any catastrophic problems for me down the road - but I need reassurance. I can't afford any problems in the next few weeks.

Pleas, give me your opinions on this subject.

Some links:

MSDN search results for "WPF Toolkit"

WPF Toolkit: DataGrid Feature Walkthrough
The DataGrid control is the only part of the WPF Toolkit that I am currently interested in using.

WPF Toolkit - June 2009 Release - Binaries and Source Code Flies
These files are hosted at Codeplex. I found this link in a few different MSDN articles, and it seems to be the most common link provided to people asking for these resources.

Answer 1

Read here. The current release is marked as Stable (and not yet Matured).

From the release notes: "Also new in the June release, we are introducing the concept of Quality Bands to rate the quality of the controls and features in the release."

"Stable

Stable components are suitable for the vast majority of usage scenarios and will have incorporated most major design and functionality feedback. They are designed to address over 90% of customer scenarios and will continue evolving via limited bug fixes and fit-and-finish work. Stable is similar to "Beta" in other projects. Stable components will have a very small number of breaking API or behavior changes when feedback demands it."

I don't know if it is the case with this toolkit, but Microsoft does use codeplex for out of band releases of things that didn't make it to the .net framework or that will be part of future versions of the framework.

Answer 2

I do know from experience that the DataGrid release on Codeplex has the same interface and functionality as the one that will ship as part of PresentationFramework in .NET 4.0

Out product uses the WPF data grid and we are currently building on .NET 4.0 . At the beginning of our development cycle we used the WPF Toolkit from Codeplex, as the CTP version of WPF 4.0 did not include the full functionality. As of Beta 1 we have switched over to the framework version of the data grid and all we had to do was change our the declaration of the data grid object to use the framework version.