The blog of dlaa.me

A customer recently asked about an update to my HtmlTextBlock sample for the newly released Silverlight 2 Beta 2. (Background reading: HtmlTextBlock Announcement, Improvements, Beta 1 Update, Data Binding Support) I'd meant to eventually migrate my samples anyway, so HtmlTextBlock seemed like a great place to begin!

I've updated the HtmlTextBlock demonstration page and also the source code download, so you can try things out in your browser and/or download the code to see how it works!

Notes:

• InitializeFromXaml was removed from Beta 2, so HtmlTextBlock now uses XamlReader.Load to set the equivalent Template in its constructor (and uses OnApplyTemplate to get a reference to the contained TextBlock).
• Some of the properties HtmlTextBlock used to explicitly expose for TextBlock compatibility have moved to the Control class (from which HtmlTextBlock derives) in Beta 2, so HtmlTextBlock no longer implements them itself (ex: FontFamily, FontSize, Foreground). A handful of TemplateBindings are used to bind these properties of the Template's TextBlock to the corresponding properties on HtmlTextBlock.
• The parameter list of DependencyProperty.Register changed slightly in Beta 2 and PropertyMetadata is now used to wrap the PropertyChangedCallback parameter.
• Special-case code for setting certain values of TextBlock.LineHeight is no longer necessary in Beta 2 and has been removed.
• The unusual "text disappears for certain font/size combinations" behavior that was present in Beta 1 has been fixed by the Silverlight team for Beta 2.

As you might expect, migrating HtmlTextBlock to Beta 2 was fairly straightforward. The majority of the changes arose because it tries to be a TextBlock and some of the text properties shifted around. (Incidentally, I wouldn't expect most applications to bump into this at all.) I hope people find the new sample useful as they come up to speed on Silverlight 2 Beta 2!