Professional Windows® Phone 7 Application Development: Building Applications and Games Using Visual Studio, Silverlight®, and XNA®

Chapter 15. Data Visualization

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding how data binding works

• How binding mode affects the binding direction

• How to use data binding in your application design

• Working with design time data

• Connecting element properties using data binding

Very few applications exist that don't make use of data in some form. In this chapter, you will learn how data binding and visualization are important in building a rich Windows Phone application. You will see how data binding is a powerful way to declaratively connect user interface (UI) elements to your data model and how you can use Expression Blend to configure data binding visually.

DATA BINDING

Probably the second most time-consuming aspect of building an application, after writing CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) code to interact with a database, is building the user interface — more specifically, displaying data, accepting and processing user input. The concept of data binding means that you can define a relationship between a UI element (also known as the target) and a data provider (also known as the source). Being able to define such a relationship both reduces the amount of code you need to write and encourages a clear separation of the data and presentation aspects of your application.

In this chapter, you're going to work with a library of books and illustrate how you can use data binding and the design capabilities of Expression Blend to build a rich user interface with only minimal lines of code. Let's ...