RoutedCommands in Silverlight

Question

Is it possible to use RoutedCommands such as ApplicationCommand.Copy, ApplicationCommand.Paste, etc in Silverlight 4 beta version ?

Answer 1

No, RoutedCommands are not supported in Silverlight although the primitive ICommand is. Silverlight 3 had ICommand but never used it anywhere. Silverlight 4 adds support to button controls to have an ICommand associated.

However, the full featured routed commands are not supported. They were not particularly useful in WPF anyway because they placed the burden of handling the command logic on the UI control that handled them. As it turns out, it is far more useful to have an ICommand exposed from the ViewModel.

Check out http://www.codeplex.com/compositewpf for the Prism project which includes some very useful classes such as DelegateCommand.

Having said that, commands like Cut/Copy/Paste are different from most commands because they are a generic command that usually applies directly to the control upon which it's executed. This is much different from a Save command for example which has a very specific meaning to the application behind the UI. For these clipboard related commands I'd say it's fine to break from the traditional separation patterns and write some UI-specific code in the code behind and use FocusManager.GetFocusedElement() to figure out which control you need to operate on.