When Bindings Fail, and text blocks show double quote greater than

Today I was tracking down a bug where my text block was showing “> (quote greater than) when the data context was null.

I’d run into this problem once before in a WPF application, but couldn’t remember what the resolution was. 

After playing around for awhile, with various things fixing the problem, but for no apparently good reason, I had another look at the XAML.  A really close look.

Here was the XAML:

<TextBlock Style="{StaticResource StrokeSummaryBigValue}" 

                          Text="{Binding Rating, Converter={StaticResource rating}}">"></TextBlock>

It looks like while typing, intellisense had entered an extra “> into the code, so that when the binding failed, it showed the text contained in the text block.

So there you have it, if you see this behavior, search your code for “>”>