Hello David,
I will start with design-time of our examples. There seem to be some issue with Visual Studio that prevents our examples from showing in design time. We found solution for this problem so for the next service pack all our examples will be have design-time in Visual Studio and Blend.
For Blend design time - you should update your copy of
System.Windows.Controls.Data.
More information here:
http://www.telerik.com/community/forums/silverlight/gridview/radgrid-manifest-error-on-blend.aspx#768279
About RadDocking design time we found some issues with Blend that we will fix for the next service pack. If this is a show-stopper for you just let me know and I'll send you the hotfix.
It seem that there are some known issues with Silverlight Design-time in Visual Studio.
For example:
Preview window shows error if reopened
Occasionally, when the Preview window or XAML View opens, an error is displayed. This can occur if the last instance of the Preview window was closed and reopened without rebuilding the project. To work around this issue, try the following:
· Always leave open at least one view of a XAML document in your project.
· Rebuild the project.
· If your project will not build, close and reload the project, or close and reopen Visual Studio.
You can read more about Silverlight known issues here:
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/readme.aspx?v=2.0
I hope that this post will bring some light over the design-time issues that you have.
Let me know if you have more troubles. I'll be glad to help.
All the best,
Hristo
the Telerik team