WPF in Action with Visual Studio 2008

Chapter 13. Custom controls

This chapter covers:

• Creating user controls
• Creating custom controls
• Changing the template on custom controls
• Making a hyperlink happy and then sad

With Windows Forms, MFC, or even straight SDK programming, you often ended up building custom controls to create a particular look-and-feel or type of behavior that the built-in controls didn’t provide. More often, though, you ended up not building custom controls, and making do with built-in behavior because building those controls was a royal pain. Building controls was generally all or nothing—either you used all the built-in handling or you built everything from scratch for your control.

WPF changes all that. First, you don’t even need to bother building custom controls ...