I love the fact that in Silverlight you can get all of your data onto the datagrid at the same time, rather than having to used a paged control in ASP.NET. However I’ve found that some users really want the data paging to remain, which means that I’ve got to roll may own DataGrid paging control. I know there are a few example out there, but I wanted to create a control that was a simple as possible but covered all of the major bases – so as little ‘code-behind’ as possible, and all the styling done in Blend. So this is what I came up with: Screenshot     Here’s the XAML   <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White" Width="Auto" Height="Auto" HorizontalAlignment="Left" VerticalAlignment="Top" Margin="10,10,10,10"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/> <RowDefinition Height="*&quo... [More]

During the creation of a recent demo Silverlight project, I tasked myself with creating a generic (re-useable) filter control that I could use to filter rows in a Silverlight DataGrid. The control had to be lightweight, and work automatically with any object collection that the DataGrid was bound to – thus making it plug-and-play for any future uses. I’ve created a great starting point with this, by designing a set of inter-operating classes that have the following key features. The Filter control of writtem completely in Xaml, using Xaml binding syntax (good designer supprt) By virtue of point 1, it is easily modified in Blend The filter control works by creating Lambda/Linq Expression trees to perform filtering. The filter control can ustilise the DescriptionAttribute for plug-and-play. Here are a couple of screenshots: 1) No filtering 2) Adding a couple of filters, by clicking on the ‘Add New Filter’ button, setting the filter and clicking on ‘Apply All Filters... [More]

Working in investment banking, I often get asked to create semi-functional prototypes of user interfaces, where the development methodology is all about speed and not about code-quality. Often these projects will be centred around the Silverlight DataGrid, and I want to get it up and running fast with whatever data object that needs to be used (the DataGrid will need to be bound to a collection of such objects). By default, a DataGrid for Silverlight will automatically generate columns, which is a great little feature in these scenarios, which is a great time saver – especially when the underlying object that your rows are binding to is in a state of flux. However, when automatically generating columns for your data, the column header is just set to the name of the property – which isn't going to impress the audience when you show off your prototype. A great solution I put together, is to use the ‘DescriptionAttribute’ on your data object’s properties, and have the DataGrid automat... [More]