Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation

Data templates

We've already seen a number of simple examples of the DataTemplate, but they are such an important part of WPF that we're going to have a much more thorough look at them now. In short, we use a DataTemplate to define how we want particular data objects to be rendered in the UI.

If we were to data bind a particular type of object to a UI control without providing a DataTemplate for it, the WPF Framework would not know how to display it. In these cases, the best job that it can do is to display a string representation of it.

<ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Users}" /> 

It achieves this by calling the object.ToString method on the data object and setting that value to the Text property of a TextBlock, which it uses to display the ...