Over the weekend I was doing a fair amount of UI stuff on a major project of mine and stumbled across a very cool and neat solution to using data templates. One of the great strengths of WPF is its ability to ‘componentise’ things into nice bite sized chunks of functionality/UI. Anyone using WPF or learning WPF will soon find the need for DataTemplates in order to style and control the display of any data created by an application. Until now I had been using ‘Inline’ DataTemplates held in the Resources section of a Window or a Page which is nice and still a very valid way of doing things, but this solution in this demo is seriously neat. Define a UserControl and use that as your DataTemplate. Keeps your XAML nice and clear and makes it really easy to design the look and feel of a DataTemplate in Expression Blend.
Anyway, that’s enough wibbling. Grab the demo solution at the link below and have a looksee.
WPF User Control As DataTemplate Demo Solution (VS2008)
You can also view a more indepth explanation of this (with a more complete demo solution included) in my article covering this technique on Code Project.
Over the weekend I was doing a fair amount of UI stuff on a major project of mine and stumbled across a very cool and neat solution to using data templates. One of the great strengths of WPF is its ability to ‘componentise’ things into nice bite sized chunks of functionality/UI. Anyone using WPF or learning WPF will soon find the need for DataTemplates in order to style and control the display of any data created by an application. Until now I had been using ‘Inline’ DataTemplates held in the Resources section of a Window or a Page which is nice and still a very valid way of doing things, but this solution in this demo is seriously neat. Define a UserControl and use that as your DataTemplate. Keeps your XAML nice and clear and makes it really easy to design the look and feel of a DataTemplate in Expression Blend.
Anyway, that’s enough wibbling. Grab the demo solution at the link below and have a looksee.
WPF User Control As DataTemplate Demo Solution (VS2008)
You can also view a more indepth explanation of this (with a more complete demo solution included) in my article covering this technique on Code Project.