Creating custom controls

Microsoft Expression Blend provides several different controls that you can style and use in your applications. However, if these controls do not meet a specific need that you have, you can create a custom control by programming a class that inherits from one of the System.Windows.Controls classes of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) or Microsoft Silverlight.

To include properties in your custom control that can be modified in the Properties panel of Expression Blend, define dependency properties in your class. For more information, see the WPF DependencyProperty Class  and Silverlight DependencyProperty Class  on MSDN.

To enable your custom control to be styled by modifying a template in Expression Blend, you'll have to include Generic.xaml with your control. For more information, see Guidelines for Designing Stylable Controls  and Creating a Control That Has a Customizable Appearance  on MSDN.

General information about creating custom controls can be found at WPF Control Customization  and Silverlight Control Customization  on MSDN.

In this section

Try it: Create a custom control with custom properties

Working with code

See also

Concepts

Styling a control that supports templates
Designing a user control from scratch

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