The Joy Of Programming

My previous post describes about making a Custom marquee control in WPF. Here is what I tried the same using Silverlight. Silverlight is getting really mature with its latest releases, it has come pretty close to WPF in most of the scenarios. There is a difference with the way you create the Generic.xaml for writing the default look. You have to manually add the Generic.xaml to the project and set the build action as Resource file. See this blog for a detailed explanation of this. And the XAML code is still the same as what we wrote in WPF. The following code has to be added to the constructor so that whenever the control gets instantiated the default style will be associated with that. public Marquee() { DefaultStyleKey = typeof ( Marquee ); } The rest of the code is pretty much the same as WPF. I have added a Duration dependency property so that end user will be able to change the speed of the animation at run time. And subscribed to the mouse enter and leave so that animation w...

WPF and Silverlight have the cool idea of 'Lookless controls' which means you can skin a control in whichever way you like. Or in other words the UI rendering logic of a WPF control lives totally in a seperate world than the control's functionality. This enables a WPF applications capaibility to dress up in totally different skins and layouts at the run time. So let me explain the creation of a simple custom control by taking the example of a Marquee control. Hope you are well aware of the HTML Marquee tag. I am explaining the CustomControl concept of WPF with Marquee control as an example. Step to Create a custom control with VS2008 The above step will give you the class file and Generic.xaml added to the project. Who is your control Parent? First I should choose the base class from which my control has to derive from. I am seeing the Marquee as a control which holds up a content element always and the content gets scrolled horizontally. So I can say that ' Marquee con...