dependency properties in Silverlight

Question

I read and read about Dependency properties in silverlight, but I still don't see the importance of it. Can someone explain me, very SIMPLE, what a dependency property is and when and WHY you need it?

Answer 1

Here's an excerpt of the Dependency Property Overview on MSDN, that should answer your question more elegantly than I ever could:

The purpose of dependency properties is to provide a way to compute the value of a property based on the value of other inputs. These other inputs might include system properties such as themes and user preference, just-in-time property determination mechanisms such as data binding and animations/storyboards, multiple-use templates such as resources and styles, or values known through parent-child relationships with other elements in the element tree. In addition, a dependency property can be implemented to provide self-contained validation, default values, callbacks that monitor changes to other properties, and a system that can coerce property values based on potentially runtime information. Derived classes can also change some specific characteristics of an existing property by overriding dependency property metadata, rather than overriding the actual implementation of existing properties or creating new properties.

Read the full article for more details

Hope this helps