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When Bands is set to its default value of 1, BandedStackPanel looks the same as StackPanel- when the value is greater than 1, additional bands show up automatically! And because BandedStackPanel is an integral part of the layout process, it's able to ensure that there are always exactly as many bands as there should be - regardless of how big or small the elements are and regardless of how the container is resized.

In this post Andrej Tozon explains about a new type of a StackPanel included in Silverlight 3, called VirtualizingStackPanel.  VirtualizingStackPanel enables UI virtualization and is now the default items panel for the ListBox, with virtualization option enabled.

If you want to turn UI virtualization in ListBox to off, set its VirtualizingStackPanel.VirtualizationMode to Standard (the default is Recycling). The embedded VirtualizingStackPanel will in this case behave as a plain old StackPanel.

Other controls that VirtualizingStackPanel can be used with are ItemsControl and ListView. It can’t be used on its own (like you would put in on a page and manually cram it with a couple thousand of items as you would with ordinary StackPanel), but the interesting thing is it is derived from an abstract class called VirtualizingPanel, which means the ability to create new kinds of virtualizing panels.

Milind Anil Soman had a problem - Blend don't provide the 'right aligned' property to Stack Panel for its child elements which will arrange the elements from right to left. To achieve this, Milind has posted a step by step procedure which deserves your attention.

This can be used when you want 'Welcome User name' text in right top corner; where 'Welcome' is common but 'User name' is dynamic. Above solution will make sure that the 'welcome' text will shift to left depending on length of 'User Name'.

In this article we are going to take a look at one of the layout controls in Silverlight 2 Beta 1 – the Stack Panel. The name is not a coincidence. This panel behaves like a Stack. The controls are ordered one after another. The default order direction is vertical, but it can be changed to horizontal too.  Though this is just a panel after all and we will use it for placing and ordering our controls in the Silverlight player.

 Let’s fill it with some controls.

Introduction

Layout controls are Silverlight controls which act as containers of other controls. Their main purpose is the positioning and arranging of their child controls. There are several layout controls: Canvas, StackPanel and Grid and TabPanel.

See also:
Canvas Article
StackPanel Article
Grid Article

Overview

All layout controls derive from the basic abstract class Panel.

There are also four more descendants of the Panel Class: DataGridCellsPresenter, DataGridColumnHeadersPresenter, DataGridDetailsPresenter, DataGridRowsPresenter. Their purpose is the positioning of elements in a DataGrid template. They are not standalone controls.

Layout controls inherit the Children collection of type UIElementCollection. Since all elements in this collection are UIElement objects and the Panel itself derives from UIElement layout controls can be nested in one another without limitation.

The following example demonstrates the nesting:

Note: to understand this example you should be familiar with all layout controls: Canvas, StackPanel and Grid

We want to have the following meaningless result (I don’t like giving real world examples, I just want to show you how nesting of layout controls works.):