WPF ObjectDataProvider - Binding Enum to ComboBox

Let's say we created some Enum data type. Now we want to show our Enum values on WPF ComboBox or ListBox. How do we do that?

In order to achieve this, in WPF we have an ObjectDataProvider class which provides mechanism for creation a XAML object available as a binding source.
Here is our Enum:

public enum TimePeriods
{
    Year,
    Month,
    Day,
    Hour,
    Minute
}

Now let's see how we bind it to a ComboBox in XAML:

<Window x:Class="WPFObjectDataProvider.MainWindow"
        xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
        xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
        xmlns:sys="clr-namespace:System;assembly=mscorlib"
        xmlns:local="clr-namespace:WPFObjectDataProvider"
        Title="CodeArsenal.Net" Height="59" Width="266">
    <Window.Resources>

        <ObjectDataProvider x:Key="timePeriodsFromEnum"
                            MethodName="GetValues" 
                            ObjectType="{x:Type sys:Enum}">
            <ObjectDataProvider.MethodParameters>
                <x:Type TypeName="local:TimePeriods"/>
            </ObjectDataProvider.MethodParameters>
        </ObjectDataProvider>

    </Window.Resources>
    
    <Grid>
        <ComboBox ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource timePeriodsFromEnum}}">
        </ComboBox>
    </Grid>
</Window>

As you can see in the code above I added ObjectDataProvider to Window.Resources. The GetValues() method gets an array of the values in an Enum. Since Enum is part of mscorlib assembly we must add a reference to it in our XAML. Finally we bind our static Enum resource to ItemSource of the ComboBox. This is what we have when we run the application:

Download the source code (Visual Studio 2010 Project).