Silverlight – Wire up your form for programming
February 4th, 2009 | 
Author: As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, learning Silverlight is a lot more about relearning some basic assumptions than it is about learning a new language. We’ve already looked at the basic layout managers available and how that impacts putting a screen together. Today we want to look at how we can capture events and access the controls from our CSharp code.
If you are already familiar with ASP.NET development, I think you will be surprised at how similar XAML coding looks to ASP.NET.
The first thing you might have trouble finding when you first try to wire up a control is how to access it by an identifier. In ASP.NET, we’d use the ID attribute. In Windows Forms, we’d use the ID attribute (unless we were in VB.NET where we’d use Name). In XAML, we use the x:Name attribute. Huh?
So if you want to just code an element’s identifier by hand, your XAML code will look something like this:
But we don’t want to have to do this by hand. So instead, we can fire up Expression Blend 2.0 and use the properties window on the right to fill it in:
<
Much easier.
Now the next thing we’ll want to do is to wire up some events. Again, you could just type it into the XAML, but once again, it will be easier if you use expression blend.
You’ll notice that just to the right of the Name field in the properties is a lightning bolt icon. Click that to get to the events that are available. Unfortunately, there is no double click support to automatically create the event, but you probably already know the drill. Just name it using the format controlName_EventName. Save your code and go back to Visual Studio and reload the file and you’ll see that you have an event handler in your CSharp code file.
style="color: blue;">private void m_button_Click
(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
}
All that’s left now is doing something in that event. So let’s set the Text property of our TextBlock (kind of like a Label in ASP.NET or WindowsForms).
<
span style=”color: blue;”>private void m_button_Click
(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
m_textBlockLabel.Text = “Button was clicked”;
}
See, from here it looks a lot like code we've been writing in ASP.NET or Windows Forms. Not a whole lot new.
Other post in Silverlight
- Installing Silverlight2 Tools for Visual Studio - December 31st, 2008
- More on SilverLight Developer Installation - January 7th, 2009
- SilverLight - Layout Managers - January 14th, 2009
- Friday Books - Silverlight 2 in Action - January 16th, 2009
- Review of the MDC at NYC - January 21st, 2009
- Silverlight - Wire up your form for programming - February 4th, 2009
- JavaScript vs Silverlight vs ... - February 10th, 2009
- Silverlight - Databinding - February 17th, 2009
- Friday Books - Data-Driven Services with SL2 - February 20th, 2009
- Silverlight - Databinding ListBox - March 5th, 2009
- Friday Books - Silverlight 2 Recipes - March 13th, 2009
- Silverlight - Binding ResourceDictionaries - March 17th, 2009
- Silverlight - RESX Files and Internationalization - April 2nd, 2009
- Friday Books - Introducing MS Silverlight 2 - April 3rd, 2009
- Silverlight, Web Services and Datasets - April 23rd, 2009
- Silverlight – Databinding to a Web Service - April 27th, 2009
- Silverlight – Navigating Data - May 7th, 2009
- Essential Silverlight 3 - October 30th, 2009
- Do you Need My Help? - November 18th, 2009
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