XAML Unleashed

Making the Control “Lookless”

As with NumericUpDown, the PlayingCard implementation from Listing 15.3 makes assumptions about its visuals. It doesn’t have to be this way. It would be nice to remove the code that retrieves the ControlTemplate resource and applies it to a ContentControl named contentControl, and somehow make this happen with the Style applied to PlayingCard. This would leave us with the following simple property:

public string Face{  get { return face; }  set { face = value; }}

Dependency Properties

Even better, let’s go ahead and turn Face into a dependency property. Dependency properties are used throughout XAML-based UI frameworks to enable styling, automatic data binding, animation, and more. For the most part, you can do ...