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I’ve seen a few good posts out there using the DomainDataSource with a ComboBox that make things look easy. Since those were already well trodden paths I thought it would be important to identify some of the harder scenarios. After a bit of investigation, three things came forward as being particularly difficult.

• Loading ComboBox contents asynchronously
• Implementing cascading ComboBoxes
• Using ComboBoxes for Entity associations

The key here are the DisplayMemberPath and SelectedValuePath properties. These apply to the object that each item in the ComboBox is bound to. In other words, these properties are set to the State, not the ObservableCollection<State>. Also, notice these properties are not data bound, they are instead set to the name of the properties respectively. We do not want the values of the properties here, we want the actual name of the properties (which is why it is called DisplayMemberPath and SelectedValuePath).

I desgined a glossy style for the Silverlight 3 ComboBox Control and ComboBoxItem.

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).

It might be useful in some scenario and makes one more click less for user. You can also find similar solution on youtube.com site where you don’t have to click ComboBox, but only move mouse over user's profile.

Matthias Shapiro has posted a ComboBox TextWrapping tutorial.

Sometimes you just want stuff to work the way you want it to work. I want a property on the Silverlight ComboBox that says “WrapText”. But alas there is not one, so I have to do it myself.

It will go over the basic about ComboBox styling and will also get updated with links to tutorials about common design problems with the ComboBox.

This first trigger I very simple.  I wanted the ability to tie a checkbox to the visibility of another UIElement.  Since a checkbox derives from ToggleButton we can get creative and write a single trigger that will work with either a CheckBox, RadioButton or ToggleButton.