SilverlightWebPart.CustomProperties Property

Hi

We are developing business intelligence components for a SharePoint 2010 Foundation site using Silverlight web parts. We would like to store the user's preferences for each component (web part) so that the same data is loaded every time the control is viewed on a specific page.

From Microsoft's documentation there is a property that will do just that - store the configuration specific to a web part instance as a key-value pair string. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.webpartpages.silverlightwebpart.customproperties(v=office.14).aspx)

I have not found a way to access the SilverlightWebPart.CustomProperties property from the SilverLight control. Does anyone know how? Or is there another approach we should be using?

We are developing using Visual Studio 2012, and are using the standard SilverLightWebPart to host our silverlight applications.

Thanks

Jason