Chapter 15: Customizing the Display

Silverlight has everything you need to format display values, convert both inbound and outbound values, provide special handling for null values and even provide fallbacks for cases when binding fails. Throughout this book, you'll see how to customize the visual representation of your data using these powerful features.

You've seen the power of the Binding object and the vast tree of functionality that grows from it. This object gives you the flexibility to bind to individual entities, to collection of entities, to indexed entries in a collection, and even to other UI elements. If you need to massage the data, either coming or going, Silverlight provides a way for you to create your own value converters to do that. If you simply need to format the display, Silverlight provides a way for that too.

You've seen binding in action. Binding rises to the near top of the most important topics to understand when getting into Silverlight. Once you master binding, you may find that you never again will write another line of control. property = value code.