Silverlight 5 in Action

Chapter 15. Extensions, converters, custom controls, and panels

 

This chapter covers

• Using markup extensions
• Understanding type converters
• Creating a custom panel
• Creating a custom control

 

Now that you know the structure and rules for XAML files, let’s look at something that allows you to bend those rules a little: extensions.

XAML allows you to represent almost anything using the object element and property attribute syntaxes. But some things can get cumbersome to do that way. For that reason, XAML includes the concept of extensions in the form of markup extensions and type converters. Silverlight also includes the concept of a value converter, but because that’s used almost exclusively with binding, I’ll cover it in chapter 16.

You’ll ...