Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Data Binding

Data binding, in its purest sense, is the capability of a control to be wired to a data source such that the control (a) displays certain items from that data source, and (b) is kept in sync with the data source. After the connection is made, the runtime handles all the work necessary to make this happen. It doesn’t really matter where or how the data is stored: It could be a file system, a custom collection of objects, a database object, and so on.

So let’s look briefly at how we can establish a data binding connection using WPF. The key class here is the System.Windows.Data.Binding class. This is the mediator in charge of linking a control with a data source. To successfully declare a binding, we need to know three things:

• What ...