Databinding with Silverlight
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Databinding with Silverlight

on Sep 15th 2010 with 5 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Difficulty: Beginner
  • Program: Visual Studio with the Silverlight 4 Toolkit, Expression Blend 4
This entry is part 7 of 15 in the Silverlight for Beginners Session
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Databinding is key, key, key in Silverlight. Additionally, it’s key. No, really. The basic idea is that we don’t want to write code that transfers data between the objects representing data in your program and the UI controls presenting that data to the user. If you’re not using Databinding, keeping UI controls and the data separate in your Silverlight applications, then the chances are you’re doing it wrong ;-)

Silverlight has simple but powerful mechanisms that allow a great degree of separation between the UI controls and the data that is bound to them.

Here we take a look at the basics of data binding in Silverlight, how we set up bindings, how bindings are resolved via DataContexts and how tools like Visual Studio and Expression Blend represent data binding.

What’s Covered?

Here’s a quick look at some of the subjects discussed in this screencast:

  • The Visual Studio Data Source window
  • Binding properties to data
  • DataContexts
  • Data changes and notification
  • Setting binding properties
  • Data collections
  • Moving to Expression Blend

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Useful Links

Mike Taulty Microsoft (UK): http://mtaulty.com: mtaulty@microsoft.com: twitter.com/mtaulty

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Mike Taulty works in the Developer and Platform Group at Microsoft in the UK where he has spent the past few years helping developers understand and get the best from the Microsoft platform. Prior to this, Mike spent 3 years with Microsoft Consulting Services as a consultant on developer technologies. You can find more of a complete career history over on LinkedIn.  

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  • Joshua Bogart

    Do Silverlight users actually exist?

  • http://mtaulty.com Mike
    Author

    Joshua,

    Yes, they do :-)

    Check the chart at http://www.riastats.com to get an idea of what percentage of people’s browsers have Silverlight.

    Also spotted in the wild are Internet Explorer users;
    http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0.

    And Windows users;
    http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8.

    None of those stats are official Microsoft figures, they’re just sites I found with a quick web search.

    No worries if Silverlight isn’t for you, your apps or your users :-)

    Thanks,

    Mike.

    • sarerrdy

      sorry this is coming now that i suppose the pose is almost closed

      @mike, pls i’ve been interested in silverlight for the past two years now, but i’m not really convinced to use it on commercial deployment application (i.e finish application for client and the market) even though i develop on silverlight for fun, selve development or for any other not too serious reason especially as regarding a website.

      can you link / direct me to any serious business or heavy traffic websites developed basically on 50% or above silverlight technology? this might be the convincing i need.

      a little google search for this links is not fruitful and very discouraging.

      thanx

  • Stefan

    Thanks for a brilliant screencast..

    The flying speed of it is what you want when watching this videos.. I’m pretty new to working with Silverlight and having trouble to see what best practice is to working with data binding against a Database from the view of an experienced ASP .NET developer. Any plans of a screencast for that?

    Cheers,
    Stefan

  • http://mtaulty.com Mike

    Stefan,

    The way that you go with this is via web services. Silverlight does not connect straight to a database.

    You may want to look at the “WCF RIA Services” framework which Silverlight uses to make a lot of that process of building a set of web services a lot more productive.

    Thanks,

    Mike.