Thanks for that! It is possible that Silverlight 4 will have this particular problem fixed. It has been marked as resolved(fixed) on connect (https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=372910). However, that’s no guarantee something’s fixed. Connect issues get opened and closed all the time with no explanation and no indication if they’re going to be fixed, so you never really know…

…Stefan

[...] Cunningham and Robby Ingebretsen did a similar implementation. Both trimming the text during the measure/arrange [...]

Interestingly, a few of my co-workers were experimenting with something similar over the past week or two and did something similar, but it would fail if it had to trim a block of text that was too large. Have you considered using a binary algorithm to figure out the length of the text as opposed to removing one character at a time?

For some reason, Silverlight 2 has a limit on the number of layout passes per page. I think the limit is 250 (see Brad’s blog: http://team.interknowlogy.com/blogs/bradcunningham/archive/2009/07/03/texttrimming-in-silverlight-2.aspx ). That’s why a binary search is needed.

Kiener’s solution gets around the problem by using a second TextBlock that is never displayed and therefore no layout passes are used. You might be able to do something similar.

Thanks for the post!

[...] In Silverlight, you always have to deal with various browser size and display something exactly the same across browser. The problem is especially important for text display. Somehow, if you only have a limted size for text display and the drawback is that some texts are cropped. Therefore, we might want to have a solution to display “…” when some texts need to be trim. Here comes to a solution. Original Post [...]

Thank you so much! This saved me a looot of time!

Hey, thanks!

I tweaked the ReduceText Method a bit, because i got an exception when the Text.Length is zero:

///
/// Reduces the text.
///
/// The text.
/// The reduced length text
protected virtual string ReduceText(string text)
{
if (text.Length > 0)
{
return text.Substring(0, text.Length – 1);
}
else
{
return String.Empty;
}
}

[...] Solution: Robby Ingebretsen at NerdPlusArt.com (and of Kaxaml fame) has a dynamic control that does just this.  http://blog.nerdplusart.com/archives/texttrimming-textblock-for-silverlight. [...]

Nice ! We can do the same thing using an attached property : http://blogs.codes-sources.com/thadeus/archive/2009/05/21/silverlight-comment-g-rer-le-d-bordement-d-un-textblock.aspx

[...] que se habían hecho a mano. Dejo la dirección del blog por si a alguien le resulta de utilidad TextTrimming TextBlock for Silverlight . Dentro del código fuente describen los términos de licencia de su uso. Posted: 19/11/2009 19:09 [...]

[...] TextTrimming TextBlock for Silverlight This should work in WPF too. (tags: ui wpf silverlight tips controls) [...]

Thanks man, works good other than the argument out of range exception as mentioned above.

Hi Robbie,

Great post, and a very useful control. I used it as a basis for a similar control to auto scale the font size of the textblock up or down to fill the available space, hope that’s okay: http://edventuro.us/2010/03/an-auto-scaling-textblock-for-silverlight/

Thanks for sharing this. I am not strong on the design side and I have always been curious how to get text to show on a faux notebook like the example above. Do you mind sharing the code for that?

I would be interesting to have a “how to”. For those who are just starting would be a good lesson, although this is not in the scope of the post.

Thanks your. It works good in my project.

I found TextTrimming is already supported in Window Phone 7.1 (Beta), but I cannot wait till its release day.

@Greg, Set HorizontalContentAlignment to Left