Latest Articles: Silverlight_DataGrid

This version of the DataGrid contains the a lot of improvements over the version that was released in the Silverlight 2 SDK, and almost 30 bugs have been fixed.

Good news !!! fixes for the buggy Silverlight DataGrid control, worth to update the DLL and start working with this control having confidence on it

Fixed the dropdown combo issue, but you will have to remove the workarounded custom combo (won't work now).

Normally when you use a Silverlight Datagridyou know which columns are you going to use so you can define it in your XAML, but... in some cases you need to add columns dynamically, in this post you will learn how to do this, quite interesting the following snippet:

Interesting: summary of features available on the final Silverlight DataGrid Release.

Good to have it as a reference, before starting coding jsut check if that functionallity already exists :-).

Interesting built in functionallity in Silverlight DataGrid, freeze columns (similar to Excel's freeze pane functionallity).

You only need to add line of code where you indicate the number of columns to freeze.

DataGrid changes from Beta 2 to RC / RTW has been traumatic, this post enumerates those changes plus workarounds have been enumerated in this post, the most important one:

The DataGrid.CancelingEdit and the DataGrid.CommittingEdit events can no longer be used. It is recommended that you use IEditableObject to track when a commit has occurred.

About DataGrid and inline editing, IEditableObject is not as well the perfect solution, you have other chances but they are not 100 % bullet proof: use LostFocus event, override IObservableCollection and add events that notifies any change on the collection (http://silverlight.net/forums/p/37051/108540.aspx).

Silverlight Beta 2 DataGrid Shipped a very useful event called CommittingEdit (before an edit in a row was going to be commited you could just perform checks and roll back changes).

In Silverlight RC0 they have removed this event because was not stable, probably it won't be available as well on the RTW/RTM version.

Right now there is no official way published to perform online editing on a Silverlight DataGrid, in the mean time, some developers have found a workaround: subscribe to LostFocus on every edit control, it doesn't work fine for all the cases (clicking outside the navigator, or in the navigator bars, ...), but at least you will have something working, meanwhile Ms post the definitive solution (no news from Scott Morrison Blog so far...).

Somebody asked how you use the DataGrid in Silverlight 2 in order to load data from a web service, modify it and submit it back so I thought I'd spend 5 minutes experimenting with that.

I wrote a very simple web service with WCF;

How to hook a Silverlight DataGrid to data via WCF web services

Here you will find interesting information, things like: how to remove or insert a row, how to send the changes to the backend via web services, ...

Quite interesting, how to perform CRUD operations on a Silverlight DataGrid using ADO .net services (data web services and ADO .net entity framework).

The article is quite summarized, you will need to download the sample code.

Pretty good tutorial about how to bind collections to a Silverlight DataGrid. You will find how to perform two way bindings (if an items changes in the DataGrid propagate that change into collection associated and the other way around), how to create different templates for just displaying or editing rows, even... cool formatters !!

Interesting, DataGrid columns support now Autosizing, you can go column by column and say: for this one I want a fixed size, for this one adjust to header or cell size...

If you have to show a lot of records this functionallity can lead you to performance issues and maybe you will have to disable it

Very basic tutorial about how to use automatic sorting (needs a datasource that implements IList).

Good for some basic sorting, but... still pending a post about custom sorting and paging.