Question

I am very new to WPF and am trying to understand the DockPanel control. I am building a Window, and am using a DockPanel in order to dock controls the way I want them. However, is it possible to dock the DockPanel itself, say to the top of the Window? I can’t seem to find a way to do this. Ideally I would like to have the DockPanel dock itself to the top of my Window so that when the Window is resized, it grows or shrinks as the window is resized horizontally.

The problem is I cannot find a Doc property on the DockPanel itself. Is this not possible to do?

Answer 1

You would need to place it within another DockPanel if you wished to dock it.

That being said, my experience has been that when a layout gets to the level of complexity you are describing, it’s often better to switch to using a Grid control. This gives you a huge amount of control over layout, and makes having dynamically growing rows/columns (with fixed size portions between) easy.

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Edit in response to comments:

You can use a Grid that scales as needed. For example, by using star syntax, you can have a grid where the top row is always 1/3rd of the window size, and the bottom row is 2/3rds, like so:

<Grid>
    <Grid.RowDefinitions>
        <RowDefinition Height="*" />
        <RowDefinition Height="2*" />
    </Grid.RowDefinitions>
</Grid>

For details on options for sizing, see GridLength. You can use “Auto” (fit to contents), “*” to scale based on space, or a fixed height (put in a number).