Songhay.Silverlight.Controls.AnalogDigit, My First Custom Control

• I think I now see where the term “Layout Root” comes from…
• I don’t think Expression Blend is built for making custom controls—which is why the User-Control concept would be needed.
• I can now see how an inexperienced developer can ‘hide’ too many visuals inside styles—these folks are trapped in limbo between making a custom control and using styles economically.
• Importantly, I now see the place where the Dependency Property is the indispensable star of the show! When there is the need to use a Dependency Property in a View Model there is probably a higher need for a custom control.
• I had too much trouble understanding the purpose of the Dependency Property because I looked at them through the MVVM lens instead of through the needs of the Control.
• The TemplateBinding declaration that we would expect to work within the scope of a UI Element does not seem to work within the scope of a Style Resource. I lost most of yesterday [2012-03-15] struggling with this.
• ILSpy (or a similar tool) is essential for learning from the pros (like Telerik) how custom controls are built.
• Remember all that System.ComponentModel stuff for tooling custom controls for WinForms? Well, here it is for XAML.

As always the source code for this stuff is at CodePlex.com.

Related Links

• “How to get the Nth digit of an integer with bit-wise operations?”
• “Silverlight 3: Template Binding vs. Relative Binding”
• “Silverlight Custom Control—Number Tumbler”

https://github.com/BryanWilhite/