Chapter 6. Working with Data: Binding, Grouping, Sorting, and Filtering

IN THIS CHAPTER, WE WILL: Dive deep into data bindings and explore all their properties. Talk about various ways to validate data. Use Visual Studio and Blend’s dialogs to create bindings. Debug data bindings and talk about ways to find errors. Group and sort data by using a CollectionViewSource.

An application would be nothing without data. In the early days of Silverlight, displaying and collecting data was not the major focus of the framework. Very soon, though, we saw the emergence of new controls, libraries, and services to make it easier to build a new kind of applications, the so called line-of-business (LOB) applications. These applications make it possible to handle large amounts of data in an efficient way, providing various advantages: