Styling tips for common Silverlight controls

Microsoft Expression Blend comes with many Microsoft Silverlight controls that you can use to create a great user experience. You can also download controls from trusted sources.

For more information, see Import a custom control by adding a reference.

If you find a control that functionally fits your needs but doesn't look the way that you want it to, and if that control supports templates, you can modify the templates of the control to change its appearance.

To make things easier, you can focus on your design by drawing everything on the artboard first, by using drawing tools, and by importing art or other assets. When you are done, you can use the Make Into Control command to convert your objects into a template for any control.

Template-binding

Controls have properties to which objects in a template can be bound. This is called template-binding. By binding parts of the template to a control, you effectively create parameters for the template. For example, instead of saying, "This Rectangle is blue," you say, "This Rectangle is the same color as the Background of the control." Thus, when you apply the template to a control with different Background properties, the result is a differently colored template.

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