Silverlight™ 4 For Dummies®

Chapter 14. Ten Cool Controls for Collecting and Displaying Data

In This Chapter

• Displaying multiple controls within a ListBox

• Managing tabular data in a DataGrid

• Editing data in a DataForm

• Expanding a view with the Expander

• Showing graphs and charts with the Chart control

• Picking dates with the DatePicker

• Showing progress using a ProgressBar

• Displaying hierarchical data using a TreeView

• Managing ratings with the Rating control

• Auto-completing a TextBox using AutoCompleteBox

Silverlight and the Silverlight Toolkit come with a bunch of controls out of the box, many of which are described elsewhere in this book. This chapter highlights some additional controls that you will find really useful for not only displaying data but also collecting them from the user.

ListBox

The ListBox is underrated as a control, mainly because of how it is traditionally used: to display a list of string values and have the user select one of them. Chapter 4 shows you how to use the ListBox, as well as the ComboBox, which is nothing more than a drop-down ListBox.

A single ListBox item in Silverlight can actually take a complex form and contain multiple controls that are nicely formatted, as opposed to containing just one line of string in traditional list boxes. As an example, if you had an object that contained the name, address, and e-mail of a person, you could display all those items in a single ListBox item, with name, address, and e-mail nicely formatted, as shown in Figure 14-1. The markup to represent this in ...