Hi Justin,

Usually I don't tend to respond to arrogant comments, but since I respect you professionaly I won't mind responding to what you mentioned.

Retemplating controls is a common thing we do as part of right-aligning different controls, but unfortunatelly basic retemplating won't work when the control's inner-code expects a different type of control in the template and therefore won't work (and indeed the toolkit is written well, thus not causing the code to crash when we supply a ListBox when a TextBox is required for instance).

Retemplating control's to support that kind of BiDi support, using the sample I gave in the post, is sometimes possible but nevertheless tedious and quite often causes me to wonder what would have happened if I was in close proximity to one of the architects in the silverlight team and had access to a shotgun that moment...

As for the toolkit - I didn't say I won't use ALL of it, I stated I'm considering other controls instead of the AutoCompleteBox, that is since I've found some other issues (bugs) with the AutoCompleteBox that prevent me from using it as I want to (already added to the issues in the codeplex site). Bugs aside, the toolkit does hold a handy set of controls and I'm sure I'll use a couple of them in the future.

To conclude, I'd accept any comment and criticism, but public arrogance is just beneath you, you know the phrase "חבל..."

Hi Justin,

I've been trying to "tweek" the BiDi.TextBox to do what you've talked about, but there are a couple of problems:

1. In SL, the TextBox doesn't inherit from TextBoxBase (as it is in WPF). unfortunatelly, both TextBox and TextBlock in SL inherit from Contro, so unless there is a plan to change the inheritance tree of these two classes, what you suggest cannot be done (perhaps this is why you haven't inherited this way in SilverlightRTL).

2. I've downloaded to source of the BiDi and checked if the code can be changed to inherit from TextBox, and after a days work came to the conclusion that because of the way the code manipulates the Text property of the control and the way TextBox and TextBlock displays that text makes it almost impossible to inherit the TextBox and maintaining the original Text property "unharmed".

I have managed to inherit from the TextBox and allow all the behavior of the base TextBox, but only by adding a new property ("RtlText"), but unfortunatelly because most codes the depend on the class TextBox, also use the Text property hard-coded in their code, and since there is no way currently to override properties, I just can't see a way to do anything else than what you did in your implementation.

But, on the good side, I have managed to use the BiDi control with the AutoCompleteBox (according to the workaround I've mentioned in the post) and I have managed to workaround the bug that I mentioned about the AutoCompleteBox itself (I'm still trying to understand how what I did fixed the bug, as soon as it makes sense, I'll write something about it).

If I'll have a better idea about the implementation of the SilverlightRTL, I'll be sure to post a comment in codeplex.

Ido.