Greg Does IT

I’m writing a 4 part series on everything (I think) is worth knowing about styles in Silverlight. The previous parts were Silverlight Styles: an Introduction and Silverlight Styles: Advanced Topics.

The third part of the series is ready and it covers the following topics:

• Style is a dependency property. Because of this, it supports the following features:
  • Data binding – it’s possible to bind a style to another (even though this is probably a very rare use case)
  • Property change notifications – it is possible to get notified when the Style property changes, a little workaround is needed though
  • ClearValue – when resetting the value of a Style, setting it to null may result in the element disappearing. It’s worth knowing what the difference between that and calling ClearValue are
• Declaring styles in code behind: creating styles programmatically is more complex that via XAML but at times this technique may be useful.
• Only dependency properties can be styled, styling CLR properties will result in either a compile time error or a runtime exception.
• Only classes descending from FrameworkElement have the Style property and thus can be styled.

You can read the detailed article on my Scott Logic blog – I hope you’ll find it useful.

The final part of the series will explore manipulating styles in runtime.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 19th, 2010 at 12:59 am and is filed under Silverlight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.