Metro app development hidden gem: anonymous type binding

Just a little post to point out a hidden gem if you are a .NET developer creating a Metro style app: you can bind to anonymous types.  This came up in a discussion with a customer today that I was having and, frankly, I never tried it until then because my mind was back in Silverlight where this isn’t possible.  There may not be a tone of cases where this is valuable for you, but knowing it is there may help.

Let’s assume I have a basic class Person:

   1: public class Person

   2: {

   3:     public int Age { get; set; }

   4:     public string FirstName { get; set; }

   5:     public string Gender { get; set; }

   6: }

And in my application I have a list of that Person type that I somehow received.  In this example, I’m just hard-coding it right now.

   1: List<Person> people = new List<Person>();

   2: people.Add(new Person() { Age = 38, FirstName = "Tim", Gender = "Male" });

   3: people.Add(new Person() { Age = 9, FirstName = "Zoe", Gender = "Female" });

   4: people.Add(new Person() { Age = 5, FirstName = "Zane", Gender = "Male" });

I can then decide I want to bind to a ListView control which has a particular template:

   1: <ListView x:Name="PeopleList" Width="500" Height="300">

   2:     <ListView.ItemTemplate>

   3:         <DataTemplate>

   4:             <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal">

   5:                 <TextBlock Text="{Binding TheName}" Margin="0,0,10,0" />

   6:                 <TextBlock Text="{Binding GuysAge}" />

   7:             </StackPanel>

   8:         </DataTemplate>

   9:     </ListView.ItemTemplate>

  10: </ListView>

Notice that I’m binding to properties (TheName and GuysAge) that don’t exist on my Person class?  In my code, I can then create a LINQ query to filter out only the “dudes” from my list and bind that result:

Read more: Tim

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