Silverlight™ 4 Unleashed

Chapter 3. Extending Your Application with Controls

IN THIS CHAPTER, WE WILL:

• Extend XAML documents with namespaces from the application.

• Understand what a user control is, and how they are created and used in Visual Studio and in Blend.

• Understand what a custom control is, what the parts and states are, and how templates are “wired” to the control.

Controls are the fundamental building blocks of your Silverlight 4 application. It is hard to imagine any user interface framework without a rich control set nowadays. In fact, we sometimes talk about “control ecosystem,” because, as you will see in this chapter, in addition to the controls that are built in to the framework, multiple providers are offering controls for the Silverlight framework. ...