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This month I had the opportunity to be on Sparkling Client three times to talk about Silverlight 3 features

• Easing – August 13
• Element to Element Binding – August 20
• Validation – August 26

Silverlight 3 has some new binding features that makes binding data to the controls even easier. The one I am going to focus on today is the ElementName property. The ElementName property gets or sets the name of the element to use as the binding source object. By using this property you can now use one user interface element as the binding object for another. This can great reduce the amount of code you need to write.

Jesse Liberty explains how with element binding it is now possible to bind the value of one object in your UI directly to a second object, without recourse to binding to a data object or handling events.

Until Silverlight 3, the easiest way to get this to work was to bind both the Slider and the TextBlcok to a data object. When the slider’s value changed, a property in the data object would be modified, and the TextBlock, also bound to that property would be updated (assuming you had implemented the INotifyPropertyChanged interface as discussed here. This can still be done, but now you can leave out the data object.

Andrej Tozon published the next two articles of the "Countdown to Silverlight 3" series. Here they are: Part 4: Element binding and Part 5: ChildWindow (Modal, Non-modal, Templated). You can find links to the previous three posts here.

There are many controls being introduced in Silverlight 3; a lot of them were pulled from the Silverlight Toolkit (the idea is that for every new Silverlight version, Toolkit controls marked as stable are moved to the Silverlight core. I’m not sure how many new controls I’m going to cover in this series, but the ChildWindow definitely deserves a separate post and sample.

Silverlight 3 enables property binding to CLR objects and other UI components via XAML – UI to UI binding. It is useful in a lot of scenarios and saves time for both developers and designers.

Example

Download source code

Syntax

{Binding Value, ElementName=MySlider}

where Value is property of a CLR object and MySlider is the name of this object

Hope that helps!