Separating Content and Presentation with the ContentControl

The ContentControl is often overlooked when building Silverlight apps. It’s used inside many controls such as the Button or ChildWindow, but it also turns out to be quite useful on it’s own for separating content from presentation.

Here is a sample of the technique I will be describing. The buttons swap between two completely different “themes” for the same UserControl but the XAML for the UserControl doesn’t contain any theme elements at all, just layout and content. It’s not Picasso, but it will do to illustrate the concept:

You can grab the source files and read my full article on Silverlight Show here.