Silverlight 3 Behaviors : Gotcha with Databinding

Sorry for the lack of posts but I'm currently moving house and trying to learn Silverlight 3. There's a lot of very interesting features coming with Silverlight 3. One of the first things I tried playing with was the behaviors built into Blend 3. The first behavior I looked to build was an ExecuteCommandAction, the idea being I could bind the ICommand of this behavior to my ViewModel. This way I could make use of the various triggers available to execute the command.

Then problems strike, The TriggerAction<T> class that our ExecuteCommandAction will inherit from doesn't inherit from FrameworkElement, we can't actually do any Databinding with this element (actually that's not true, you can set up your binding elsewhere on a different FrameworkElement and use the new ElementName binding expression) but that doesn't help us.

I have seen a few implmentations of this currently out there, these all involve using reflection to find the property on the attached object's DataContext. While it works it's not strongly typed and has to resort to the reflection API (which I think you should avoid if possible).

This is something I'd love to see changed during the Silverlight 3 Beta as having the ability to do full data binding on these new behaviors through the Blend 3 UI will make for some excellent functionality.

I hope to have more up soon on Silverlight 3.