Petar,

While that does seem to do the trick, it throws an exception in the Visual Studio designer (at least in mine). When I try to view the view in the designer it says "NullReferenceException was thrown on "ControlTemplate": Object reference not set to an instance of an object."

I included a screenshot so you can see it.

If we can clear that up, then I think it will work out for me!!

Thanks for the help!

-Jeff

Petar,

I just d/l your project and will check it out. I have a case open with support about the designer errors. I'll continue that outside of this thread. Thanks for the help!!

Just to be clear though, I don't have this designer limitation with any intrinsic controls or other 3rd party controls that I have styled so far. If the IG controls cripple my IDE just because I need to style them, then I see that as a HUGE disadvantage to using IG controls. I use my VS IDE for a lot of things and rely on the designer for parts of that. Just my thoughts, but I have to consider that going forward....

-Jeff

Hi Jeff,

I do see what you mean however this in not exactly crippling the IDE. Also I am not saying that this cannot be done otherwise, however when creating lots of independent parts as styles, templates that provide, localization theming there are cases that the designer must be sacrificed for the sake of integrating runtime functionalities. Other cases are when something works good in runtime it isn’t always a good idea to turn it headfirst for the sake of the designer, especially when in Blend designers can still manage. I am not sure if in this particular case we are seeing one of the above mentioned issues and if this is indeed important it can be sent to the XamDataGrid developers for their assessment on the matter.

Please let me know if I can help with anything else on the matter.

Petar,

I disagree and here is why. There are those on my development team who are not "graphics inclined". They don't use blend because many times their task only entails setting up some bindings, or clicking on a control and setting properties in the properties window. The problem is, now that I used an IG control and styled it, they are forced to work directly in Xaml or learn a new tool. And it doesnt end there, because even if they used blend, many times properties are just displayed in random order in the misc tab of the blend IDE so it's actually harder to find things that are plain to get to in the VS properties window.

Maybe I should not have used the term crippled IDE, but it certainly cripples the designer in the IDE.

I do understand what you mean that sometimes to give a good user experience you do things in such an advanced way that VS doesnt deal with it, and perhaps that is a Microsoft issue. Afterall, no style that compiles should crash the designer, if anything, it should just not interpret things it cant understand (as long as they are valid and compile) .

In  the end I think it would be nice to use the designer from Blend in the VS IDE at least for rendering purposes, but until (or if) that happens, I think you guys might want to look at this from 10,000 feet. Using IG controls with styles breaks the VS IDE. There needs to be a workaround from my perspective as other controls just don't give me this problem.

Just my thoughts!!

-Jeff

Petar,

Thanks for following up. I appreciate the follow-up!!

-Jeff