Pro Business Applications with Silverlight 4

Chapter 11. Creating Custom Controls

When designing user interfaces in any technology, you ideally want to encapsulate the look and behavior of commonly used user interface elements into a reusable component that you can use elsewhere in your application or even in other applications. Creating custom controls also reduces the amount of code required in the code-behind, simplifies the XAML in your views, and helps maintain a consistency in your user interface.

We already have a wide range of controls available to use from the core Silverlight control set, the Silverlight Toolkit, and open source controls on CodePlex. Plus, there are many more in the form of third-party controls (from companies such as Telerik, ComponentOne, and Infragistics). Occasionally ...