My mental model of how dependency properties work:
Any DependencyObject
class implements two special properties. One, a static property of the class, is a dictionary of DependencyProperty
objects. Every instance of the class can look inside that dictionary to find metainformation about each DependencyProperty
- the property's name, its type, any callbacks that have to be called when it's get and set, how it participates in property inheritance, and so on. When you register a dependency property, you're adding an entry to this dictionary.
The other property is an instance property: it's a dictionary, keyed by DependencyProperty
, that contains the local value of each DependencyProperty
, if it has been set.
The SetValue
and GetValue
methods that you implement in the setter and getter of the CLR property are basically lazy evaluation on steroids. Instead of storing and retrieving the value of the property in a backing field, they store and retrieve the value of the property in the value dictionary.
The magic of dependency properties is in what GetValue
and SetValue
actually do.
GetValue
looks up the value for the property in the object's value dictionary. If it doesn't find it, it calls GetValue
on the parent element, to get what the parent element thinks the value is. For instance, when you create a TextBox
in a Window
, anything that looks at the TextBox
's FontFamily
is actually calling GetValue
. Unless you've explicitly set the font, there's no entry in its dictionary for that property. So GetValue
asks the parent element for the value. The parent element may or may not have FontFamily
set; if not, its call to GetValue
to returns the value from its parent. And so on, until the Window
object is reached and the actual FontFamily
value is found.
If you set FontFamily
on the TextBox
, SetValue
stores the value in the value dictionary. The next time anything needs to get the value of the FontFamily
for that TextBox
, GetValue
finds the value in the dictionary and returns it, so it doesn't need to ask the parent element.
If you set FontFamily
on the Window
, SetValue
not only updates the value in Window
's value dictionary, it fires off a property-change event that everything dependent on the property hears. (That's why they're called dependency properties, remember.) And if the thing depending on the property is itself a dependency property, it fires off its own property-change events. This is how it is that changing the FontFamily
on the Window
changes the font for every control in the window and also prompts WPF to re-render the controls that have changed.
Attached properties work using the same kind of approach. Any object that can have attached properties has a dictionary that the attached properties' values are stored in. When you set Grid.Column
on a CheckBox
in XAML, you're just adding an entry to that CheckBox
's dictionary. When the Grid
needs to know what column the CheckBox
is in, it looks the value up from that dictionary. When you set Grid.IsSharedSizeScope
to True
on an object, that object's dictionary will contain a new property - a dictionary that contains widths/heights for each SharedSizeKey
.
I should emphasize that this is my mental model. I haven't sat down with Reflector and looked at the actual implementation of Register
, GetValue
, and SetValue
to figure out how they actually work. I may be wrong about the details. But it's a model that accurately predicts how this stuff behaves, so it's good enough.
The concept of storing property values in dictionaries is pretty weird to C# programmers. It's old hat to Python programmers, though. In Python, all class properties - all objects, in fact - are stored in dictionaries, and so you can get to their value either through property accessors or just by looking them up. Dependency properties and attached properties are just another way in which .NET, having stolen everything Java had that was worth stealing, is now plundering Python. (Or from wherever Python plundered them from.) Learning Python has made me a much better C# programmer; I recommend it to any C# developer who hasn't done it yet.