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The AutoCompleteComboBox can be used in typical Object-to-Object associations (one that we typically encounter when creating associations in Entity Framework) as well as Foreign Key associations (the new association type introduced with Entity Framework 4).

One of the controls available is the AutoCompleteBox. This represents a control that provides a text box for user input and a drop-down that contains possible matches based on the input in the text box. When this is used in conjunction with RIA Services, you have a complex solution with minimum code. 

A while back Lee posted a sample that extends AutoCompleteBox which worked in Silverlight 2. Now he upgrades this sample to Silverlight 3.

I did not add/remove anything functional. just fixed the errors that are caused by the changes in base class(AutoCompleteBox).

You can try a sample here and download the code here.

This short post re-creates the HighlightingTextBlock control, using the Templated Silverlight Control item template that ships in the Silverlight Tools. When I last blogged about the highlighting text block control, I had to describe in detail how to go about creating a library, creating the default control styles file (Generic.xaml), setting properties, and putting it all together.

Using the same steps and control template XAML from this post, you can create a Visual Basic implementation of the control alternatively.

So you’re playing around with Silverlight in Blend 3 and you set up some sample data. (If you don’t know how to do that, I’ll get to that in this tutorial too.) Your sample data is all set up and you’ve attached it to your AutoComplete box… but nothing happens. You get angry and throw your computer out a window (unless it’s a MacBook, in which case you apologize to it for flirting with Microsoft technologies and take it for a little cuddle), but you eventually think you want to try again and so you go looking for the problem on the internet. Hopefully that is what brought you here.

Silverlight’s AutoCompleteBox control provides a nice way to filter a list of items as the user types into a TextBox.  If you haven’t used it before you can see an example here. In a previous post I showed how you could customize AutoCompleteBox to make it look and feel more like an editable ComboBox so that users can click a down arrow to see the list of items and also filter the items by typing into the TextBox.

One of the great features Silverlight offers is the ability to customize controls by using control templates.  If you don’t like how a particular control looks you can modify the template and in many cases be ready to use the new control without writing a single line of C# or VB code.  I’m working on a client application that uses the AutoCompleteBox found in the Silverlight Toolkit and needed a way to change it from a regular TextBox to more of an editable ComboBox.  Fortunately the Silverlight Toolkit samples (for Silverlight 2 and 3) already do something like this as you can see here (once on the page click on AutoCompleteBox to the left and then on the Styling tab at the top of the page to see the sample).

At Lee’s Corner there is an article about how to extend AutoCompleteBox.