Basic Controls

A number of basic controls ship with Silverlight. The focus of this book involves more advanced scenarios, so I won’t be covering the controls in detail. Table 3.4 lists all of the basic controls that ship with Silverlight and what their primary purpose is. Use it as a reference to help determine what built-in controls make sense for your application.

Table 3.4. Basic Controls Shipped with Silverlight

Control	Description
Border	Places a border around another element (may have a fill and a stroke or border, as well as rounded corners).
Button	Provides a hit surface for the user to click to trigger an action. Supports binding to commands.
CheckBox	Default implementation of a toggle button, or a hit surface that behaves like a switch and can have either an “on” or “off” state (or a “null” state if three-state mode is set).
ComboBox	Presents a list of options that can be expanded and scrolled to select a single item. When it does not have the focus, this control collapses to a single line and displays the selected item.
HyperlinkButton	Special type of button designed to direct the browser to navigate to a URL when clicked.
Image	Basic media element used to display static image data.
InkPresenter	A special panel that allows strokes or “ink” to be displayed that supports Tablet PC features.
ListBox	Presents a list of selectable items. Multiple items may be selected.
MediaElement	Container for audio and/or video.
MultiScaleImage	Host container for the DeepZoom technology that allows for large images to be encoded using tiles at various resolutions to facilitate rapid panning and zooming.
OpenFileDialog	A special dialog that allows the user to navigate to a file on his system without violating the trust of the security sandbox that Silverlight runs in. The result is a file stream handed to the runtime.
PasswordBox	Special text box that masks the content.
Popup	Provides an overlay that displays on top of existing content, used for displaying temporary information such as dialogs and notifications.
ProgressBar	A container for showing progress that animates either continuously (for indeterminate “in progress” notification) or in specified increments (to show percentage-based progress).
RadioButton	Provides mutually exclusive selection of one item from a group.
RepeatButton	A button that continuously raises the click event at a predetermined interval when clicked.
RichTextBox	A container for rich text that allows embedded media, multiple fonts, sizes, and formatting.
RichTextBoxOverflow	An overflow container to allow automatic reformatting of content, including text, images, and other UI elements to span multiple containers. Common uses are to flow around images and provide multicolumn views.
SaveFileDialog	Prompt that allows the user to indicate a file on his local file system that returns a stream you can then write to.
Slider	A special graphical interface that allows the user to drag a “thumb” across a surface to indicate a value.
TextBlock	Container for read-only text.
TextBox	Container that allows text entry.
ToolTip	A special control that allows text to be shown to the user when the associated control is hovered over as a “tip” for how to use the control.
WebBrowser	A container for browsing web pages and parsing HTML content within the Silverlight application.