Rob Relyea - Xamlified

# re: WPF Master Pages@ Friday, February 22, 2008 5:33 AM

The concept of MasterPages is a great one, which could be useful for WPF applications for all the reasons that their a great idea in ASP.NET applications. However, Brad's DataTemplate approach has the drawback of making it harder to manipulate controls in the content areas from the code-behind of the parent Window.

Karin Huber's approach (www.codeproject.com/.../WPFMasterPageControl.aspx), which exposes the content zones as Objects, enables you to do this._myControl.Whatever in the code-behind (rightly or wrongly. I was surprised it worked :o)), and also enables you to handle events in the code-behind, too.

The major drawback (for me at least) with either approach, is that you cannot do element binding between content zones. For example, if you had a Details zone which was intended to display some details for the selected item in the main content zone (kinda master-detail), then you cannot do a "{Binding ElementName=masterControl, Path=SelectedItem}" in the details zone because the binding engine is unable to resolve the element.

If there was a MasterPage solution that simply provided a layout framework, but you could access elements and handle events in the code-behind AND binding between elements in different content zones, then I'd be happy :o)

# Daily Bits - February 22, 2008 | Alvin Ashcraft's Daily Geek Bits@ Friday, February 22, 2008 9:13 AM

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# http://blogs.windowsclient.net/rob_relyea/archive/2008/02/21/wpf-master-pages.aspx@ Friday, March 28, 2008 5:53 AM

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# WPF Master Pages (kinda sorta) | Blake on Stuff@ Tuesday, July 01, 2008 4:13 PM

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