Why won't Silverlight handle the conversion of my custom float property

Question

In a Silverlight 4 project I have a class that extends Canvas:

public class AppendageCanvas : Canvas
{        
    public float Friction { get; set; }
    public float Restitution { get; set; }
    public float Density { get; set; }
}

I use this canvas in Blend by dragging it onto another control and setting the custom properties:

alt text http://www.farseergames.com/storage/share/PropertyInBlend.Png

When I run the app, I get the following error when InitializeComponent is called on the control containing my custom canvas:

Failed to create a 'Windows.Foundation.Single' from the text '0.0'

alt text http://www.farseergames.com/storage/share/SilverlightError.Png

I'm not sure why Silverlight isn't able to convert this property from it's string representation in Xaml, to the float that it is.

Anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

The Native Text Syntaxes sub-topic lists the types that Xaml natively knows how to convert. Fundementally the primitive types supported are double, int, bool and string.

Answer 2

Got this from twitter friend Cameron Albert:

That is odd, I wonder if it would fail if that was a double?

Switched to doubles and no more error. Still curious that floats don't work.