Custom Cursors in Silverlight

There has been quite a few blog posts on how to create custom cursors in Silverlight, but I felt some of them were very limited or not very re-useable, or required you to put the cursor in the layout and put restrictions on your layout (like for instance requiring you to use a Canvas as parent for your cursor). So I ended up writing my own class for it that doesn’t have any of these restrictions.

The basic idea is the same as other approaches out there: You “disable” the cursor on your element by setting myElement.Cursor = Cursors.None. Next you move a custom UIElement around on top of your layout which represents your custom cursor. My approach uses a Popup, and therefore never requires you to modify your layout, and you can easily change the cursor on the fly. The cursor look is defined using a DataTemplate and can contain animations and so on.

All you need to do is define a DataTemplate and use the Attached Property to define the template. Below is an example of this working on a border element:

<UserControl x:Class="CustomCursor.MainPage"

   xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"

   xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"

   xmlns:local="clr-namespace:SharpGIS.CustomCursor">

   <UserControl.Resources>

        <DataTemplate x:Key="CircleCursor">

            <Ellipse Fill="Red" Width="20" Height="20" />

        </DataTemplate>

   </UserControl.Resources>

   <Grid>

       <Border Background="Blue" 

           local:CustomCursor.CursorTemplate="{StaticResource CircleCursor}" />

   </Grid>

</UserControl>

Read more: SharpGIS

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