Silverlight (wp7)

Question

Being new to silverlight I'm struggling to 'get going' with the following.

Basically I wish to create some form of grid like control (custom or user?).

The idea is similar to that of a planner. Along the top are times (set intervals). Downwards are subjects. Then over the grid like background rectangles (or something) indicate when the subject is planned for.

The actual design of the above is not the issue. ie a grid with ractangles overlaid. But my issue is I wish this grid to be scrolled up and down (with bounds fixing the top and bottom when the subject lines start and end). And also the grid to be scrolled left and right (with bounds fixing how far left and right it can scroll, current time & 3 days into future).

Based on the above needs, I don't wish to create a control which is very large, and just dragged into view (unless this is the only way?) but instead show the grid at a current time and when dragged dynamically load the next few hours worth of content, possibly with a few hours buffer.

The appearance I am seeking is it looking like it is one massive control, but truely its not, its dynamic.

Does this make sense? Am I worrying about nothing? Should I create a massive grid well into the future and then just handle the load of data dynamically over the top? Its just my concern if I want a grid 3 month into the future this would be massive and a waste of memory.

I'm struggling to find examples on the net, but feel this maybe to do with me not knowing what to search for. This isn't about getting a detailed answer and someone doing it for me, but instead about guidance pointing me in the right direction.

Many thanks

Answer 1

About the up-down scroll: you can simply put a grid containing your data in a ScrollViewer control - this will handle all the scrolling for you. Another solution would be using a listbox control - this is better if you use MVVM. You can bind it to a data source and set as data template a custom control.

For the left-right scroll. I'm thinking you could use gestures for this. Like - catch left-to-right and right-to-left flicks and change the data in your grid / listbox according to the gesture's direction. You could also place two buttons at the top of the grid to handle scrolling from one day to the other (just like in the calendar controls: gestures + buttons).