Silverlight, being a rich UI framework, provides us with many controls ready to be used out of the box. But, no matter how rich the toolbox may be, there will come a time when you wish to create your own controls. Creating your own controls in Silverlight can be done by creating either a user control or a custom control. As creating the user controls is easier than creating the custom controls, we will introduce this method first.
A user control, in its core, is nothing more than a combination of existing controls that can be reused throughout your application. Once we learn about dependency properties later on in the book, we'll see how user controls can be extended with data binding and templating.