Tip: Don’t be scared to use x:Name in XAML

joel — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:30:49 +0000

Yesterday I was working on some Silverlight production and needed to create a custom UserControl that had some text. The trick was that I wanted the user placing the control to choose which color the text would be, inturn effecting the second key frame on a simple ColorAnimationUsingKeyFrames

My animation was really simple, I wanted the text to start out as white old for a few milliseconds then fade into my dynamic color. My first tendency was to just create the Storyboard procedurally, but did not want to lose the “blendability” of my control. Then it dawned on me how simple the solution was. Just name the second KeyFrame.

All to often we forget that we can give virtually any XAML node an x:Name and the framework will create a private reference to the element.

Once we have named our node, in the corresponding code behind we can simply reference any property from that element.

destColor.Value = Color.FromArgb(255, 10, 10, 10);

Silverlight | WPF | Microsoft.Net » x:Name

Tip: Don’t be scared to use x:Name in XAML