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This article is Part 4 of the series on Microsoft Silverlight Exam:

• Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 1)
• Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 2)
• Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 3) 
• Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 4)
• Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 5)
• Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 6)
• Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 7)

We are making great progress in our Silverlight Exam series, we are now in the fourth part already. A quick look back on the previous parts shows that we started with a deep look at the layout and UI-related material. In the second part, we looked at enhancing the UI using features such as the Visual State Manager. In the previous part, the focus was mainly on the coding part, including topics such as dependency properties, the ICommand interface and working asynchronously with services.

This fourth part will focus on a very important aspect: data.

This article is compatible with the latest version of Silverlight.

This article is Part 2 of “A classic memory game”:

• A classic memory game: Part 1 – Designing the game 
• A classic memory game: Part 2 – The game logic, connecting the ViewModel and the View
• A classic memory game: Part 3 – Porting the game to Windows Phone 7 

The series is about building the following classic memory game in Silverlight, and porting it to Windows Phone 7. In the first article we started a new MVVM Light project, created the controls and designed the game-states.

I create value converters so often in my Silverlight and WPF development, that I created a C# item template that I use over and over in Visual Studio.  I’ve posted the item template to the Visual Studio Gallery so you can use it too.  The Visual Studio Gallery is integrated with Visual Studio 2010, so you can install and start using the template right from Visual Studio.

There are plenty of articles on the web detailing how to localize strings within Silverlight applications, however, one area of confusion seems to be how to get Silverlight to accept text input using the users current culture settings.

For example, if I type 10,1 in a locale that uses the ‘,’ symbol as the decimal symbol I might expect to get the decimal number “10.1” (UK Format), however, I will in fact receive the number 101.

I have just released a new version of WF(2)XAML. In this version (0.6 BETA) i have implemented the following changes:

• Added support for different destination projects
  • WPF User Control
  • WPF Window
  • WPF Page
  • Silverlight User Control
  • Windows Phone Navigation Page
• Changes in config file [...]

When using data binding in Silverlight, we often have to include one or more converters. A converter is a class that implements the IValueConverter interface. This class defines 2 methods, Convert and ConvertBack. Convert is applied when the data in the data binding action flows from source object to target control. A common use for converters is formatting a date value that comes from the database into a specific format or adding a currency symbol to a double value.

This article is compatible with the latest version of Silverlight.

A common scenario in data binding is to format the data displayed in the UI. Almost every time you show a date or a price you need to format it. Silverlight and WPF are using the so called converters to apply custom logic to a binding.

Using Converters

Let's make a small example that illustrates the problem. Consider a ListBox filled with client details - name and birthdate.

Here the ListBox is bound to a custom business object with a field Birthdate of type DateTime - pretty common situation.