XAML Unleashed

Creating a Custom Control

The beauty of the user control model lies in having the class definition spread across a XAML file and a C# code-behind file. This provides a familiar development experience, just like creating a Page. We can leverage this model for a more sophisticated control, even one that doesn’t derive from UserControl. In this section, we’re going to create such a control called PlayingCard, which represents a playing card to be used in card games.

The tendency for designing a simple user control is to start with the user interface and then later add behavior, as we did with NumericUpDown. For a control that includes better support for things like restyling, it usually makes more sense to start with the behavior. That’s because ...