Introduction to WPF Layout

Why layout is so important

Best Practices

Vertical and Horizontal Alignment

Margin and Padding

Width and Height

Content Overflow Handling

Layout of controls is critical to an applications usability. Arranging controls based on fixed pixel coordinates may work for an limited enviroment, but as soon as you want to use it on different screen resolutions or with different font sizes it will fail. WPF provides a rich set built-in layout panels that help you to avoid the common pitfalls.

These are the five most popular layout panels of WPF:

• Grid Panel
• Stack Panel
• Dock Panel
• Wrap Panel
• Canvas Panel

• Avoid fixed positions - use the Alignment properties in combination with Margin to position elements in a panel
• Avoid fixed sizes - set the Width and Height of elements to Auto whenever possible.
• Don't abuse the canvas panel to layout elements. Use it only for vector graphics.
• Use a StackPanel to layout buttons of a dialog
• Use a GridPanel to layout a static data entry form. Create a Auto sized column for the labels and a Star sized column for the TextBoxes.
• Use an ItemControl with a grid panel in a DataTemplate to layout dynamic key value lists. Use the SharedSize feature to synchronize the label widths.

Use the VerticalAlignment and HorizontalAlignmant properties to dock the controls to one or multiple sides of the panel. The following illustrations show how the sizing behaves with the different combinations.

The Margin and Padding properties can be used to reserve some space around of within the control.

• The Margin is the extra space around the control.
• The Padding is extra space inside the control.
• The Padding of an outer control is the Margin of an inner control.

Alltough its not a recommended way, all controls provide a Height and Width property to give an element a fixed size. A better way is to use the MinHeight, MaxHeight, MinWidth and MaxWidth properties to define a acceptable range.
If you set the width or height to Auto the control sizes itself to the size of the content.

Clipping

Layout panels typically clip those parts of child elements that overlap the border of the panel. This behavior can be controlled by setting the ClipToBounds property to true or false.

Scrolling

When the content is too big to fit the available size, you can wrap it into a ScrollViewer. The ScrollViewer uses two scroll bars to choose the visible area.

The visibility of the scrollbars can be controlled by the vertical and horizontal ScrollbarVisibility properties.

<ScrollViewer>
    <StackPanel>
        <Button Content="First Item" />
        <Button Content="Second Item" />
        <Button Content="Third Item" />
    </StackPanel>
</ScrollViewer>
 

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 Comments on this article

Prerak Shah	Commented on 5.May 2009 Good Fundamental :)
Syed Ibrahim	Commented on 12.May 2009 Superb
shrek88	Commented on 17.May 2009 short and very useful
Enoya	Commented on 19.May 2009 very clear to understand
Charmis	Commented on 26.May 2009 Hi Christian, Thanks for the article. The "Stack Panel" link is broken. It points to StackLayout.html(which gives Article not found! ) instead of StackPanel.html
Christian Moser	Commented on 27.May 2009 Hi Charmis, ...thank you! I fixed the link.
Anil	Commented on 1.June 2009 Thanks for the nice and informative article Christian! How can I make any of these panels dockstyle->fill to the entite window? I was trying to fill the entire window with a canvas panel, but could not see any Docking property for it. - The window size changes, the canvas size remains the same :(
anonimo	Commented on 22.June 2009 supremo (y)
Prabhakar	Commented on 30.September 2009 Thanks Now i am confident on layouts usage and control orientation. Learned from this tutorial about padding and margin.
ironstone13	Commented on 23.October 2009 Thanks To the point and very concrete. Though some more depth would be good
Chaitanya	Commented on 2.November 2009 Good to understand
Doudy	Commented on 2.November 2009 Hi Christian, Thanks for this article, really I learned from you the basic steps in WPF. Thanks, I hope you complete it.
Raja	Commented on 4.November 2009 Thanks a lot , it is very nice artical
Malu	Commented on 6.November 2009 kinda Okay but can add more points
Monica	Commented on 9.December 2009 Very informative, I hope you can make an article about stretching the whole application in a window. :)
pooja	Commented on 4.January 2010 hey..its really gud...