Homemade controls in WP7 Silverlight?

Question

In Windows Phone 7 Silverlight, is there a way to design a custom control from scratch - ie with custom drawing and custom touch processing? What do I subclass for that?

Answer 1

Yes you can. You usually subclass Control, ItemsControl, or ContentControl. Here is a blog post that explains the process in detail: Creating a WP7 Custom Control in 7 Steps

Answer 2

As mentioned, you can create a custom control from scratch by deriving from the Control class. To implement gesture handling you can use the GestureService from the Silverlight Toolkit for WIndows Phone 7 or you can directly handle the ManipulationStarted , ManipulationDelta , and ManipulationCompleted UIElement events.

Jeff Prosise has a great series of four posts that cover touch manipulation in great detail:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

For the "custom drawing" part, what did you have in mind? If a control built up from primitives isn't what you had in mind, what about lines and shapes ?