Designing Silverlight Business Applications: Best Practices for Using Silverlight Effectively in the Enterprise

6. Data-Binding

DATA-BINDING IS NOT UNIQUE TO SILVERLIGHT and has been around since WinForms. It was combined with Xaml in the earliest days of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Xaml and data-binding go hand in hand because it is the power of data-binding that makes Xaml useful as a tool to decouple the user interface from the underlying data and logic. Data-binding takes advantage of Xaml and the dependency property system to work magic for your Silverlight applications.

In the last chapter, you learned about the Visual State Manager and how it helps abstract behaviors and the implementation of the user experience (UX) from the underlying business logic. Data-binding performs a similar task relative to raw data. Data in its native format ...