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Source: Sharker Khaleed Mahmud Silverlight Tips & Tricks

In this entry I am going to do a simple scenario involving copy and paste. Basically, the clipboard class has three members, ContainsText, GetText and SetText. To demonstrate, I will use a simple textbox.

In his blog Alex van Beek compared Flex 4 and Silverlight 4’s clipboard access abilities.

In this post I’m comparing Flex 4 and Silverlight 4’s clipboard access abilities. My previous post was rather long, so I’ll try to keep this one short :). Accessing the clipboard should be an interesting comparison, since both Flash 10 and Silverlight 4 take different approaches. I deliberately said "Flash 10" in the previous sentence, because accessing the clipboard in a Flex application is done by using the native Flash 10 ActionScript api and there isn’t any specific Flex code required. 

The next article from Gill Cleeren's Advent Calendar article series is focused on using the Clipboard in Silverlight 4.

Silverlight 4 has the ability to copy text to the clipboard, check if there is text available on the clipboard and paste the text from the clipboard back to the Silverlight application. To support this, it has 3 static methods available on the newly added ClipBoard class:

• Clipboard.SetText()
• Clipboard.ContainsText()
• Clipboard.GetText()

Let’s look at using these in a sample.

In the Silverlight 4 beta, only Unicode text can be retrieved from the clipboard or added to it. Microsoft hasn't said whether the final release will support additional clipboard formats, but one can always hope.

To demonstrate, I built a sample app that features a Paste button for pasting text from the clipboard into a TextBlock.

In Silverlight 3 we had copy/paste available in the Textbox, programmatic access could be done, some IE only solution exists via HTML DOM bridge (so not OOB) or cross-browser (involving Flash!). But now the game has changed as we now have an API for multi-platform Clipboard access.