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Trying to create a modern, clean and crisp user interface is a challenge – and it’s something that Zune has done rather well in both their software and hardware experiences.

I took a few minutes to experiment with new Silverlight 4 features, including the new Silverlight Toolkit (April 2010 release) that includes a context menu control, to re-style/re-template the menu to look similar to a few other menus.

I was contacted by Simon Weaver via Twitter about a problem where the Bindings for MenuItems of a ContextMenu on a DataGrid were acting as though they were associated with a different row than they really were. This seemed pretty weird until Yifung Lin, one of the original DataGrid developers, suggested this might be due to the row recycling behavior DataGrid uses to improve performance. It turns out he was right - but the rabbit hole goes much deeper than that...

A few days ago, Martin Naughton and Tiago Halm de Carvalho e Branco independently contacted me to report a problem they were having with the new ContextMenu control in the April '10 release of the Silverlight Toolkit. In both cases, they were toggling the IsEnabled property of a MenuItem directly and reported that the control's visuals weren't updating correctly. I was a little surprised at first because I knew I'd tested dynamic changes to the enabled state and I'd seen them work properly. But once I created a test project to investigate the report, I saw how the problem scenario was different.

Introduction

One of the things I found frustrating in the previous versions of Silverlight was the lack of the Right Mouse Click support. Now we know that this functionality has turned real with Silverlight 4. Furthermore, we know that the April 2010 Silverlight toolkit release comes with a ContextMenu Control to be used in combination with the right click. So it’s time to put these new things in practice and try to use them in our projects. In this article we will see how to create and use a ContextMenu, how it is made and then we will extend it in a peculiar way.