Handling Events from the Business Layer in XAML WPF

Question

I am very new to WPF, and I have a very basic WPF question:

Suppose we have a custom dll with some business logic that fires events such as ModemIsConnected. On the UI side (.xaml) there is a label that changes its value to OK once that event is fired. I would like to offload the event handling portion (changing label's status and other minor UI tweaks) to a designer. Is it possible to handle events in xaml without creating code-behind?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The simple answer is I don't believe it's possible. There are no doubt things you can do with data binding and the like, but then you're getting beyond the kind of thing you want a designer to be doing.

A couple of options:

1. Teach the designer the bare minimum of coding an event handler and calling a storyboard. With intellisense and the nice interaction between Blend / Visual Studio you could have someone up and running fairly quickly.

2. Have them create storyboard animations for any of the 'minor UI tweaks' you require, and then you can hook these up to the event and change your label text with only 3-5 lines of code.

Answer 2

You can have the designer do the UI side without them having to get their hands dirty with code. You could create a class that implements IPropertyNotifyChanged with a boolean property that changes as the modem state changes. The designer can then bind to that property and do fancy triggers, state changes etc etc from within the XAML and the binding system will handle "telling" the UI the value has changed.