Blend Behaviours - can you bind to their properties?

Question

I am currently migrating a number of attached behaviours I have created to Blend Behaviours so that they support drag and drop within Expression Blend. I have noticed that authors of Blend behaviours tend to define the behaviour properties as dependency properties.

I have created a behaviour, TiltBehaviour, which exposes a public dependency property, TiltFactor, of type double. Within Expression Blend I can set the value of this property, however, the option to add a "Data Binding ..." is grayed out:

I have also noticed that Behaviors extend DependencyObject, therefore they do not have a DataContext and therefore cannot inherit the DataContext of the element to which they are attached. This feels like a real weakness to me!

So, the bottom-line is, if I cannot set a binding to my behaviors dependency property in Blend, and it does not inherit a DataContext, why bother using dependency properties at all? I could just use CLR properties instead.

Answer 1

Edit: dain is correct you can still bind to the DataContext which is created artificially, how often have you seen people bind to a SolidColorBrush.Color? It also works even though SolidColorBrush inherits from DependencyObject and hence has no DataContext.

See this blog post on the inheritance context.

The thing is that since the behaviours are attached, they do not appear in the logical tree and hence would not inherit a DataContext anyway.