After skinning my nth control I got fed up with continually referring to the MS source code via reflector and made up my own diagram with all the control contracts in them. Print it out and stick it up on your work wall, hopefully you guys find it useful. Shoot me a comment of any changes you feel would be beneficial to this diagram.
If you don’t know what a contract is then refer back to my post on “Skinning a button – 4 different ways and counting“. Put simply the standard Silverlight controls wire themselves up to customized skins by finding specifically named storyboard’s and visual elements. At the moment the easiest way to retrieve these contracts is to interrogate the controls source code via reflector, I thought it would be easier to have a document that identified these contracts.
I also plan on maintaining this diagram over time, enjoy
Low quality JPG – [500k] – ControlContracts.jpg
High quality PNG – [850k] – ControlContracts.png
This builds on top of my other diagram “Silverlight Control Hierarchy“.
You can also find this article on my new home site at CynergySystems.



dude, this rocks…. hopefully we can start to build up a simple skins library as time goes on like there is in wpf…
completely agree with you!
On a side note the tooling for templates in blend for Silverlight is terrible. It’s such a turn off at the moment, I honestly hope Microsoft are going to fix this sooner rather than later.
I have to create dummy xamls with all my skins then copy and paste into the resources section. It’s good in the sense that It’s gotten me to learn the in’s and outs of templating BUT from a usability perspective TERRIBLE!
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Thank you
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This rocks … thanks so much for doing this.
wow !!
Thanks
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My family members every time say that I am killing my time
here at net, except I know I am getting knowledge all the time by reading such pleasant posts.