Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Layout

Because software needs to present controls and data on a screen for visual consumption by users, the layout—or how things are arranged onscreen—becomes an important design feature. Good layout systems not only have to enable developers to structure controls in a coherent fashion, but also need to be robust in terms of how they handle things such as window resizing and flow.

In WPF, layout is exercised through a set of container controls called panels. Each panel is uniquely suited for a specific layout scenario, and the capability to combine them with one another means that the layout system in WPF can handle a large number of different control organization scenarios. The key point to understand with panels is that, as containers, they ...