WPF Custom Control Dependency Property Gotcha

Let's say you have a custom WPF control called SearchTextBox.  It has a textbox and a button labeled "search".  Simple enough, you reuse it in your application when you want to provide search. 

Then one day, you decide you need this control needs to be bindable.  So you expose a public property Text and map it to textSearch just like you would in WinForms.

Well, that doesn't work, so you google around and stumble upon Dependency Properties and learn how to create your own (VS snippet shortcut propdb) and create a Text DP.

Now you spend 30 minutes trying to map your Text DP to your textSearch.Text until you finally figure out that your DP snippet lead you astray and there is one more step that didn't get included in the shortcut.  In the UIPropertyMetaData, you need to specify a function to call when the property changes - so you can set textSearch.Text.

The function looks like this:

And the rest of the DP looks like this:

The important part here is what wasn't created by the VS snippet :

new UIPropertyMetadata(string.Empty**, new PropertyChangedCallback(textChangedCallBack)**)

Now you are binding to your custom control and all is good.

This article is part of the GWB Archives. Original Author: Tim Hibbard

New on Geeks with Blogs

  • We Won The One Award I Actually Care About

    Full Scale made the Inc. 5000 for the fifth year straight, the 12th listing across my three companies. Here is why the one award you cannot buy is worth stopping for.

  • Your Customers Build the Features Now

    I let a tool I liked sit dead for a year rather than build the features I wanted. An MCP server meant I never had to, and your customers can do the same to your product.

  • Get the Size of a Directory in Linux the Easy Way

    du -sh for the quick answer, ncdu for the cleanup, df for the disk itself: every command for checking directory size in Linux, plus why du and df never agree.

  • Vim Search and Replace: The Ultimate Guide

    One :%s command replaces every match in a file before a find dialog would even open. The Vim substitute patterns worth the muscle memory: flags, ranges, capture groups, and multi-file edits.