Yeah, sometime in WPF the simple things can be a little more involved. To do what you want to do the best thing is to change the style for the CellValuePresenter for that Field. Field.Settings exposes a property for this called CellValuePresenterStyle. You can set this in xaml or by listening to the FieldLayoutInitialized event. e.g.:

 private void XDG_FieldLayoutInitialized(object sender, FieldLayoutInitializedEventArgs e)

{

Style deptStyle = new Style(typeof(CellValuePresenter));

Setter setter = new Setter();

setter.Property = CellValuePresenter.BackgroundProperty;

setter.Value = Brushes.Yellow;

deptStyle.Setters.Add(setter);

deptStyle.Seal();

foreach (Field field in e.FieldLayout.Fields)

if (field.Name == "department")

{

field.Settings.CellValuePresenterStyle = deptStyle;

break;

}

}