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Martin (LawBot / SilverLaw)

To reposition a ChildWindow at runtime a user does a left click on the title bar of the childwindow, drags the childwindow, moves it around and drops it at it's new position. When the user drops the ChildWindow he releases the mouse button and a MouseLeftButtonUpEvent fires. This event is fired by the Chrome, which is a ChildWinow Control Template Part. 

Short description:  

1. Import System.Windows.Interactivity.dll.

2. Add a reference to the .dll in the download.

3. Drag the behavior from the asset panel onto a ChildWindow.

4. Set a fixed width and height to the ChildWindow. Set width and height of the Layoutroot to Auto.

The Silverlight 3 ChildWindow is not very attractive. So I decided to design it with some styling. I also styled a Silverlight 3 Toolkit Accordion Control. Both I put together and made an upload to the Expression Gallery as a full sourcecode example, licensed under Creative Commons.

Especially the sourcecode of the Accordion styling might be truly helpful for your own styling adventures. And in fact: Styling a Silverlight 3 Toolkit Accordion Control is really an adventure.

In this article Jeremy Likness demonstrates how to build decoupled ChildWindow dialogs using Prism.

A common user interface component is the confirmation or message box, which is often presented as a dialog returns a boolean (OK/Cancel). There are a variety of ways to achieve this, but how can you decouple the implementation of the popup from the request itself? This is necessary, for example, for unit testing when you may not have a UI available. This article demonstrates one solution using Silverlight and the Composite Application Guidance library, also known as Prism.

I was at client’s location and been asked about the ChildWindow title customization with an icon. I had to admit, that I never tried to put something different than text and immediately looked at the type of Title property. For my surprise I found that the property is an “object”, and assumed that it could behave as a ContentPresenter/ContentControl. After 5 minutes I had the client’s request solved.

In this example Allan Muller has placed a button inside a StackPanel which once clicked, shows the ChildWindow.

What I do is create the ChildWindow on MainPage Loaded event as a private member and then I can just show or hide it. The reason I do not just keep creating new instances of the ChildWindow is because the garbage collection in Silverlight isn’t the greatest and I would prefer to keep my apps to a minimum.

ChildWindow can be used as a pop-up dialog or window in your Silverlight 3 applications. This webcast shows how to add, launch, change background overlay color and opacity and position your ChildWindow.