Unless I’m missing something, there’s no direct way to bind XAML-ish text to a WinRT RichTextBlock control.

For example, if I have some text like:

<Paragraph>
    This is some text. And some <Bold>bolded text</Bold>.
</Paragraph>

I would like to just bind this text to a RichTextBlock control for display. Sadly there’s no way to put content into a RichTextBlock control at runtime short of adding Block objects to the control’s Blocks collection.

As a workaround, I’ve been playing with the idea of a custom control like this:

using Windows.UI.Xaml;
using Windows.UI.Xaml.Controls;
using Windows.UI.Xaml.Markup;

namespace Application11
{
  public class RichTextDisplay : ContentControl
  {
    public static readonly DependencyProperty XamlProperty =
        DependencyProperty.Register("Xaml", typeof(string), typeof(RichTextDisplay), new PropertyMetadata(null, XamlChanged));

    public string Xaml
    {
      get { return (string)GetValue(XamlProperty); }
      set { SetValue(XamlProperty, value); }
    }

    private static void XamlChanged(object sender, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e)
    {
      var ctl = (RichTextDisplay)sender;
      var xaml = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
      xaml.Append(@"
<UserControl
  xmlns=""http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation""
  xmlns:x=""http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml""
  xmlns:mc=""http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"">
  <Grid>
    <RichTextBlock>");
      xaml.Append(ctl.Xaml);
      xaml.Append(@"
    </RichTextBlock>
  </Grid>
</UserControl>
");
      var text = xaml.ToString();
      var xr = (Control)XamlReader.Load(text);

      ctl.Content = xr;
    }
  }
}

This isn’t ideal, but it does work. The RichTextDisplay control dynamically creates a RichTextBlock control, inserting the XAML document text into the body of the newly created control.

I suppose the other alternative would be to write code that parses the text to find the XAML elements and produces a series of Block objects that can be added to the control’s Blocks collection…