Silverlight Tips of the Day - Blog by Mike Snow

Silverlight Tip of the Day #47 – How to Implement a Password Box

With the release of Silverlight 2 RC0 there are three new controls we will be discussing that were not available for beta 2. The three new controls with a Tip of the Day for each include:

• ProgressBar
• ComboxBox
• PasswordBox

For this tip we will be exploring the PasswordBox control. Password boxes are great in that they hide the characters a user is typing for privacy and security reasons. It is essential to use this control whenever you are receiving a password from a user.

The following code below shows how to declare, size and position a password box in your XAML:

<PasswordBox Canvas.Top="20" x:Name="UserPassword"  Width="200"></PasswordBox>

By default Silverlight uses a “dot” as the character to hide the characters the user typed.

You can override this character using the PasswordChar property:

<PasswordBox PasswordChar="*" Canvas.Top="20" x:Name="UserPassword"  Width="200"></PasswordBox>

You can also do all this programmatically in your code behind:

PasswordBox passBox = new PasswordBox();

passBox.Width = 200;

passBox.SetValue(Canvas.TopProperty, (double)300);

passBox.PasswordChar = '*';

MyCanvas.Children.Add(passBox);

Note that we have to take the extra step to add it to our Canvas control so that it appears in the element tree.

Thank you,
--Mike Snow

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