As I stated in an earlier post, I will have a very common scenarion where I will have a ComboBox for picking a Customer from the list and binding that back to the database in a ForeignKey field. I will have this on over a dozen data input forms. I will also have lots more combos for picking other things (Vendords, Employees, etc)

So, I want to think about the best practice for populating ComboBoxes so that I do not have a lot of redundent code in the code-behind on all my forms.

Presently, I only have one form designed so far, and the ItemsSource property is established in the Constructor of the Window. But going forward, I want to have a class library or some strategy so that I have all this wired up already, that I just "drop" (or code) onto a form in a less hard-coding kind of way.

The ItemsSource will come from a very simple Linq call:

            IEnumerable<Customer> custs = from a in ctx.Customers
                                          select a;
            dropdownJobStatus.ItemsSource = custs; //Set the UI

Then here is the XAML:

        <ComboBox x:Name="dropdownJobStatus" Width="113" IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem="True" AllowDrop="True" 
                  DisplayMemberPath="company" SelectedValuePath="custno" SelectedValue="{Binding Path=cust_num}"/>