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To paint the picture, I am introducing Silverlight to creatives, Flash devs, and people in the business.  Each group needs a different story.  At first I went about it the same way: naturally I would load Visual Studio, create a new project, knock out some XAML, and then run the app.  THIS IS NOT A GOOD IDEA.  Instead, I found myself increasingly opening Blend and showing people around.  This lead to more interest and more questions.

Introduction

This articles focuses on the process of creating a Custom Control in Silverlight 2. It describes the basics of what you need to build a styleable control with custom logic that can be used in Silverlight applications. The article shows a sample(part) of implementing a LinkLabel control that recognizes URIs in a given text and displays them as links instead of as plain text.

Overview

The control model in Silverlight 2 offers creating UserControls and Custom Controls. UserControls enable encapsulation of a specific logic. They are used in scenarios where you want to reuse XAML and/or logic in multiple places or build a sophisticated page with smaller chunks(the UserControls). However, in other scenarios you may need a custom logic to be built in the control and this control to allow designers customize easily its look. You need a way to modify the control visuals without having to modify the control logic. This is where the Custom Controls comes in handy. In Silverlight they derive from the Control class and specify a default style for the way they will look like.