WPF Control Questions

Question

I just switched over to WPF from just regular C# .NET for the more advanced UI design controls. I have managed to become extremely confused over what should be extremely simple, and I hope someone can help.

Basically I want to have sections on either side (for the most part these will be list-boxes inside of expanders), one list-box in the bottom-middle, and then a large rich text box taking up the middle.

My understanding was that I could just take a DockPanel, set the ChildFill to true, dock each one where it should go, and leave the last one to fill the space. The list boxes alone don't seem to work at with the DockPanel, and the DockPanel does not seem to expand when I change the size of the window.

So basically my questions are...

1) Why does the DockPanel not expand/shrink when I change the size of the window?

2) Buttons seem to work fine in the Dock Panel (like all of the examples I found) but using List Boxes instead does not seem to work properly. Why is this?

3) If I put the list boxes inside of Expanders instead, if I have say two of these on the left side, and I shrink the top expander, will the bottom expander grow upwards to fill the gap?

I can't really afford anything like ActiPro, and I was not able to get the AvalonDock controls to show up on the MSVC 2010 toolbar, so I am pretty much stuck using the default controls.

Answer 1

1). I have just tested the DockPanel and it does expand / shrink when the Window is resized - Have you removed the Grid that is placed in the Window by default in Visual Studio? If you mean it doesn't resize proportionally to the Windows size then i think you will need to use a Grid.

2). Again, list boxes work fine for me - Can you provide some more detail explaining why they don't work properly?

3). It depends on what you mean by "Grow upwards". If the top expander is closed, only the header will be displayed and the bottom expander will move up to take the space taken by the first expanders content (this is the default behaviour).

Do you have some XAML you can post as this will help identify your problems.