Tips

Have you ever noticed that the MouseLeftButtonDown and MouseLeftButtonUp events are not fired when a Silverlight button is clicked? The reason for this is that the button handles these two events itself by overriding the OnMouseLeftButtonDown  and the OnMouseLeftButtonUp  handlers. In the OnMouseLeftButtonDown  override the Click event is raised and the MouseLeftButtonDown event is marked as handled so it couldn't bubble in the visual tree. The OnMouseLeftButtonUp  override also marks the MouseLeftButtonUp  as handled.

Just use the following line.

C#

Application.Current.Host.Content.IsFullScreen = true;   

Entering full-screen mode in Silverlight has some restrictions. To ensure that it is initiated by the user entering full-screen mode is possible only in response to one of these input events: MouseLeftButtonDown. MouseLeftButtonUp, KeyDown, KeyUp.

That's it!

To add scrollbars to ItemsControl you have to modify the control template and to add ScrollViewer for the ItemsPresenter.

Xaml

<ItemsControl >
    <ItemsControl.Template>
        <ControlTemplate>
            <ScrollViewer x:Name="ScrollViewer" Padding="{TemplateBinding Padding}">
                <ItemsPresenter />
            </ScrollViewer>
        </ControlTemplate>
    </ItemsControl.Template>
</ItemsControl>

Styling control is a very easy way to tweak the minor visual characteristic of the control such as foreground and background colors, the font style and size, padding, etc. Usually the styles are stored as resources which allows you to reuse them whenever you want.

The Style has TargetType specifying the type of the object the style can be applied to and a key used to identify the style. The Style contains numerous Setters, which describe the values which you want to set to specific properties.

To apply style to a control simply specify the Style property of the control to point to the static resource with a specific key name.

First let's explain what the convertors can be used for. Imagine you bind to an object's property, but the property is not formatted to your likings. In this case you can use converters. For example we bind to the PublishDate property of a Book object and want the date to be formatted like this - "dd MMM, yyyy".

Book myBook = new Book();

myBook.PublishDate = DateTime.Now;

First let's create our converter.

User control static resources are used to declare instances of objects that should be alive and reusable throughout the whole life of a user control. When you declare a static resource in the Xaml of a user control Visual Studio actually declares this instance as an internal class field of that user control, thus making it directly accessible only in your code behind. Usually such things like styles and templates are declared as static resources and as result they can be used multiple times from within your control.

If you're not familiar with the value converters read this. The methods generated by the VisualStudio when creating a custom class that implements System.Windows.Data.IValueConverter have several arguments. One of them is of type object and is called parameter.

public class DateTimeConverter : System.Windows.Data.IValueConverter

{

    public object Convert( object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture )...

    public object ConvertBack( object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture )...

}

In this example we bind to an object of type Book:

public class Book

{

    public DateTime PublishDate { get; set; }

}

We can pass this argument from the code or from the Xaml.

Text box control in Silverlight supports multi line mode but surprisingly it does not have such property as Multyline. That is why, in order to make one text box multi line, you have to set its property AcceptsReturn to true.

Xaml

<TextBox x:Name="textBox" AcceptsReturn="True"></TextBox>

C#

TextBox textBox = new TextBox();

textBox.AcceptsReturn = true;

That's it!

Syntax

Style cascading is accomplished by using the new BasedOn attribute of the Style class.

   1: <Style x:Name="Headline" TargetType="TextBlock">

   2:     <Setter Property="FontFamily" Value="Verdana" />

   3:     <Setter Property="FontSize" Value="14" />

   4: </Style>

   5: <Style x:Name="ImportantHeadline" TargetType="TextBlock" 

   6:     BasedOn="{StaticResource Headline}">

   7:     <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="Red" />

   8: </Style>        

   9: <Style x:Name="HomePageHeadline" TargetType="TextBlock" 

  10:     BasedOn="{StaticResource Headline}">

  11:     <Setter Property="FontSize" Value="18" />

  12: </Style>

Here we have a base style Headline that targets TextBlock elements and defines values for FontFamily and FontSize.