Silverlight™ 4 For Dummies®

Part II. Managing Your Silverlight Controls

In this part . . .

This part delves deeply into the world of controls. In Chapter 4, you find out about some of the most commonly used controls, such as text boxes and buttons, and Chapter 5 shows you how to arrange them effectively on-screen.

Silverlight allows you to change the appearance of a control without changing the way it works, and we give you the goods on this topic in Chapter 6. You can see how to create a style by specifying property values for a certain control and reuse that style throughout in your application, thereby providing a consistent look for your controls throughout.

In Chapter 7, you find out how to create your own controls, whether they are a collection of controls that you want to reuse in your application or something you create from scratch. Chapter 8 introduces you to the exciting world of animation, and you get a taste of animating controls on-screen.

Finally, Chapter 9 introduces you to the concept of data binding. When you write programs the "traditional" way, you are constantly setting properties when the data it displays changes. With data binding, however, you can tell the control what kind of data it is bound to, and Silverlight takes care of the rest. This chapter gives you a solid launch into this wonderful way of programming, and you see how to create data sources and sample data to test your application. ...