Professional Silverlight® 4

Chapter 6. Working with Visual Controls

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Finding Silverlight controls

• Using UI controls

• Creating custom controls

Like most other Microsoft platforms, Silverlight allows developers to use controls to define an application's user interface (UI). Controls allow developers to be more productive by encapsulating reusable chunks of behavior and a UI into a single package that makes it easy to add the user interface to your application. Rather than being responsible for drawing every detail and coding every behavior, controls allow you to focus more on the specific requirements of your application and less on developing those lower-level capabilities.

Silverlight provides a rich set of native controls as part of the platform. Additionally, there are many other sources of controls including the Silverlight SDK, Silverlight Toolkit, third-party vendors, and open source projects. This chapter will introduce you to many of the controls across all of these resources. The chapter is not intended to be an in-depth guide to every single control included in Silverlight, however, because many of the controls are fairly self-explanatory. Additionally, although this chapter will touch on certain controls such as MediaElement and TextBlock, they are discussed in much greater detail in other, more applicable chapters of the book.

Note

Because of the large number of Silverlight controls that are available from a variety of sources, it can be difficult to know what assembly a specific ...