Our software uses the DataGrid throughout its user interface for displaying editable lists. While editing some metadata, I wanted to remove the text in a particular column for many rows. This is pretty quick if you get into the rhythm of F2-Backspace-Enter, F2-Backspace-Enter, F2-Backspace-Enter….
Things don’t go quite so well if you miss the F2 part of the pattern and just press Backspace-Enter on a cell. The WPF DataGrid will actually replace the contents of the cell with the backspace character. Depending on how you look at your string, this might show up as 0×08, , \u0008, or \b.
What on earth?
This CodePlex post confirms a bug in the DataGrid and includes some workarounds. On our end, the current fix is simply to ignore strings that have a backspace character in them. This way they don’t end up in the XML, which is good because in XML 1.0 the backspace is an illegal character.
See also this Microsoft Connect issue.