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The ContentControl is often overlooked when building Silverlight apps. It’s used inside many controls such as the Button or ChildWindow, but it also turns out to be quite useful on it’s own for separating content from presentation.

Introduction

The ContentControl is often overlooked when building Silverlight apps. It’s used inside many controls such as the Button or ChildWindow, but it also turns out to be quite useful on it’s own for separating content from presentation.

Here is a sample of the technique I will be describing. The buttons swap between two completely different “themes” for the same UserControl but the XAML for the UserControl doesn’t contain any theme elements at all, just layout and content. It’s not Picasso, but it will do to illustrate the concept:

You can grab the source files here.

Button derives from ContentControl. That means Button can contain pretty much anything. We’ll focus on content for most of the rest of this post.

Scott Guthrie talks about the final release of Silverlight 2 and emphasizes on all the good applications that had been made with the help of Silverlight in the last few months. But probably the most interesting part of his article is the glimpse to Silverlight 3, for which he says that will include major media enhancements, major graphics improvements and major application development improvements.

Boyan Nikolov has made a Calculator for Silverlight which is implemented as a custom control. The source code for the Calculator is available for download.

Ning Zhang wrote a post about the design and implementation of HeaderedContentControl and Expander Control in Silverlight Toolkit.

Mike Snow has a new tip in which he talks about the various data collection schemes in Silverlight.

Jeff Paries has a small tutorial on sending e-mail from Silverlight.

Here is one sample that shows how to bind text elements that load localization resources from the server side resx file via a WCF service in Silverlight 2.0.

Chris Hay has an article for Silverlight Sockets in which he wonders if you could really use such a feature in an Internet application.

Suprotim Agarwal has a post about DataBinding in Silverlight. In his example you can find how to change the UI Property of a Control based on the property of another control at runtime.

DotNetRocksTV has just posted a discussion with Billy Hollis that goes through a number of concepts in WPF/Silverlight layout, ContentControl and XAML.

Scott Guthrie has another interesting post. It is about Styling a Silverlight Twitter Application with Expression Blend 2. His reasoning is provoked by the 10 minute video tutorial of Celso Gomes.

Jeff Handley added some extra features to the Silverlight Airlines application. He is sure that this helped him to learn more about Silverlight.

Introduction

We’ve introduced you to the basics of Custom Controls in our previous article. Now we will give another example this time involving the Visual States Manager. We will create a templatable ContentControl that uses animations on its Content and the States & Parts model proposed by Microsoft.

Dowload source code

Parts & States Model

The idea behind the States & Parts is to separate better the logic from the visual appearance and thus to allow better flexibility for both.