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Conditional Formatting in the Silverlight DataGrid
I’ve been an asp.net developer for some time now and I was excited to jump on to Silverlight when it 2.0
was released a few months ago. One thing I really struggled with was applying conditional formatting to
the individual cells in the DataGrid control. Coming from an asp.net background, I carried a lot of
assumptions with me (big mistake). I thought I could get a hold of the rows or cells collection and have
my way with it, but no such luck. I stumbled down several paths which all ultimately lead to dead ends.
After killing hours (maybe days) on trying to figure this out, I had to let it go and move on. Now a month
later I decided to give it another shot and I finally got it. The answer was right in front of me all along.
I knew about the IValueConverter interface, but I didn’t fully understand its capabilities. I thought it was
only used for converting an object into a text representation or vice versa. Actually, you can return
anything you want from it. So you can return a Button, Grid, or whatever.