Silverlight Data Template Selector using Managed Extensibility Framework

Sometimes it makes sense to have multiple types of views contained within a list or region. In WPF, a data template selector can help determine which template is used based on the data template, allowing a container to mix different types. It's not so straightforward with Silverlight because the DataTemplateSelector class does not exist.
There have been some excellent articles on the web with simple workarounds for this, but they often involve some sort of dictionary or hard-coded selection process. What I wanted to do was provide an example that does several things:

• Allows you to add new templates easily simply by tagging them with attributes,
• Is design-time friendly, and
• Handles dependencies in the templated views, if needed

The target situation is a hypothetical social media feed that aggregates data from different types but shows them in a single list. This example mocks the data but should be sufficient to show how it could be done. Consider this screenshot which shows three different styles of presenting data in the list:

Read more: C#er: IMage

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