Visual Studio 2010 includes rich tooling support for
building Silverlight and WPF applications.
It includes a WYSIWYG designer surface that enables you to
easily use controls to construct UI – including the ability to take advantage
of layout containers, and apply styles and resources:
The VS 2010 designer enables you to leverage
the rich data binding support within Silverlight and WPF, and easily wire-up
bindings on controls. The Data Sources window within Silverlight projects
can be used to reference POCO objects (plain old CLR objects), WCF Services,
WCF RIA Services client proxies or SharePoint Lists.
For example, let’s assume we add a “Person”
class like below to our project:
We could then add it to the Data Source window
which will cause it to show up like below in the IDE:
We can optionally customize the default UI
control types that are associated for each property on the object. For
example, below we’ll default the BirthDate property to be represented by a
“DatePicker” control:
And then when we drag/drop the Person type
from the Data Sources onto the design-surface it will automatically create UI
controls that are bound to the properties of our Person class:
VS 2010 allows you to optionally customize each UI binding
further by selecting a control, and then right-click on any of its properties
within the property-grid and pull up the “Apply Bindings” dialog:
This will bring up a floating data-binding dialog that
enables you to easily configure things like the binding path on the data source
object, specify a format convertor, specify string-format settings, specify how
validation errors should be handled, etc:
In addition to providing WYSIWYG designer support for WPF
and Silverlight applications, VS 2010 also provides rich XAML intellisense and
code editing support – enabling a rich source editing environment.
