Question

I don’t know if this should go on Programmers, but I thought it was relevant here.

Being a skilled WPF programmer myself, I often wonder what people were thinking when they designed WPF in terms of naming conventions.

Why would you sometimes have a property called Children for accessing the children of the control, and then sometimes have an equivalent property, just called Controls instead? What were they thinking here?

Another example is the Popup control. Instead of a Content property, it has a Child property. Why would you do that? To me that’s just confusing.

So I’m wondering if there’s a logical reason for it, which would probably also help me understand what the properties are called next time I need to do some speed-programming.

If there’s no reason behind it, then all I can say is WAT.

Answer 1

I’ve never seen a Controls property; as for Child versus Content: Content can be any object, data for example, whereas a Child has to be some FrameworkElement in the hierarchy of the controls. To me that makes perfect sense.