Question

I am working on a Silverlight application, and I want to bind the simple text property of textblock through a property of string type.

What I did was:

<TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}"/>

Code behind:

public string Name{get;set;}

Name = "Testing..!";

but it will not work.

Answer 1

To expand on anatoliiG’s answer (which will work): Data binding refers to properties on the DataContext property of the current element by default. This means that your

<TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}" />

is actually translated to

Set the value of the Text property to this.DataContext.Name

(DataContext is inherited, so if it is not explicitly set on the TextBlock it will check the parent, then the parent of the parent etc etc)

You can resolve your problem in one of two ways:

1. You can set the value of this.DataContext on the parent to the parent itself (as anatoliiG suggests). This means that when it looks up this.DataContext.Name it will be checking the Page itself, which is where your Name property is found.

2. You can change your Binding so it looks at the Page instead of Page.DataContext when it is looking up bindings. You can achieve this using the RelativeSource markup extension:

This translates to:

Find the first ancestor of the TextBlock that is of type Page, and bind to the Name property on that object

As a final note, you will also need to implement INotifyPropertyChanged on your DataContext object if you are going to ever change the value of Name.

Oh, and you should be using view models as the DataContext instead of the Page itself!