creating custom controls in silverlight

Question

can you tell me what is the proper way to create custom silverlight controls? I want to make a control that consists of three other controls: textblock, autocompletebox and image. The textblock will act as a label for the autocompletebox and the image will provide additional tooltip. My question is: what type of class should I inherite from? How can I expose properties and events of the inner controls? I found that I can set values of child controls by creating additional dependency properties in the container class and using callback function like this:

public static readonly DependencyProperty TextProperty = DependencyProperty.Register(
    "Text",
    typeof(string),
    typeof(MyCustomControl),
    new PropertyMetadata(
        default(string),
        (source, args) => (source as MyCustomControl).TxtValue.Text = (string)args.NewValue
    )
);

However this method works only if the property in the child control is declared as dependency property. But for instance in autocompletebox there is a property called ValueMemberBinding which is not a dependency property and I can't find a way how to expose this from MyCustomControl.

Maxim V. Pavlov Maxim V. Pavlov · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-17T13:03:56

My question is: what type of class should I inherite from?

You inherit from Control class.

Here is a basic tutorial.

How can I expose properties and events of the inner controls?

As for properties - if you use xaml for setting up the controls contents and layout, you need to assign an x:Name property to each element, who's properties you want to expose. Then, they bacome available in code-behind and you can expose them as public properties.

As for events, you subscribe to the events of the inner elements and link them to your controls public events.

creating custom controls in silverlight

1 Answers