In my trials and tribulations in bulding my RSS aggregator for Longhorn, I've started to try to put together a custom control to do my feed grouping, since the Avalon treeview isn't available yet.  I've watched Jeff Bogdan's excellent PDC session a few times (with varying levels of attention paid each time - maybe that's why I don't quite “get it” yet), read through examples put together by Ryan Dawson and Nathan Dunlap, and I've been digging through the Longhorn SDK, and I can't help but wonder about one thing: what about a default style?

I understand that in Avalon, we're supposed to strive to create controls that have no hard-coded knowledge of their presentation - just the underlying logic.  I dig that, it allows for the greatest amount of flexibility, and takes a lot of the need away for the control coder to force himself to design a control that looks good for all situations.  My problem is that I can't find any way to define a default style, a default visual tree for the custom control.  Right now, we have to create a style for the control in the application in which it's loaded, and that's ok - for now.

I can't see it working in the long run - are we going to have to distribute a XAML file with our control, so that developers can plug it into their application and start coding right away, or will there eventually be a way to define a default style/visual tree inside the control, so that all we'll need to distribute is the DLL?  Or, OR am I missing something in the SDK or the demos or somewhere that defines how to get this done?

Enquiring minds want to know... or at least be pointed in the right direction.

- G

[UPDATE - Rob Relyea (PM, Avalon) mentions in the comments that what I want will be possible when it's all said and done - just not yet.]