Windowscommunitytoolkit: DockPanel

[Liero]

Not sure if there is a good alternative in UWP. There is relative panel, but as far as I know there is nothing like <DockPanel LastChildFills="True">

Is this suitable candidate for UWP Community Toolkit?

EDIT: since there already is uservoice, I will not create another: https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/110705-universal-windows-platform/suggestions/17781382-implement-dockpanel
Please vote there

[hermitdave]

Hi.. why not raise a user voice entry here https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/110705-universal-windows-platform and we can gauge the developer interest ?

[skendrot]

If you want it to be toolkit specific use this link: https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/110705-universal-windows-platform/category/193402-uwp-community-toolkit

[Liero]

If I will contribute and the quality will be excellent, do you need votes on uservoice for this feature in order to accept my PR?

[deltakosh]

I'm pretty sure quality will be excellent :) But to be sure we are not adding controls in the toolkit that are not used (even if they are excellent) we need to measure the community interest

[deltakosh]

As you can see here, there is not a big traction: https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/110705-universal-windows-platform/suggestions/17781382-implement-dockpanel
But this could also because people are not aware of this entry.

[skendrot]

Any reason you cannot use a Grid? I personally find myself using Grids over DockPanels in WPF to help understand the layout when viewing XAML. This also helps future developers understand the layout.

[Liero]

this feels more natural for me:

<DockPanel>
   <Button Text="Search" DockPanel.Dock="Right"
   <TextBox x:Name="TbxSearch" />
</DockPanel>

than this:

<Grid>
    <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
         <ColumnDefinition />
         <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto"  />
    </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>

    <TextBox x:Name="TbxSearch" />
     <Button Text="Search" Grid.Column="1" />
</Grid>

I also like UniformGrid, since its very common UI pattern - columns with equal width.

<UniformGrid Rows="1">
    <views:Column1 />
    <views:Column2 />
    <views:Column3 />
</UniformGrid>

than this:

<Grid>
    <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
        <ColumnDefinition />
        <ColumnDefinition />
        <ColumnDefinition />
    </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
    <views:Column1 />
    <views:Column2 Grid.Column="1" />
    <views:Column3 Grid.Column="2" />
</Grid>

UniformGrid is especially useful when using it as ItemsPanelTempalte, because grid does not work here. But maybe there is alternative I don't know about

People are complaining about verbosity of XAML all the time and these small tweeks helps to keep the view cleaner.

[JohnnyWestlake]

@Liero for what it's worth, it's possible RelativePanel might be a replacement for DockPanel in some of your scenarios.

[lukeatron]

I just found this issue trying to figure out why I don't have DockPanel in UWP. As a dev who's spent years building Windows WPF apps, DockPanel was perhaps only second to StackPanel in terms of the primary tool I use for layout. Perhaps I'm missing something (I'm pretty new to UWP) but RelativePanel seems to require you name everything you want to layout. Naming a bunch of mundane things that don't have any obvious implicit name is just a terrible thing to have to spend your time on.

I think the only reason you're not hearing any one talk about this is that there's a pretty small circle of people doing UWP work and of those, at least some of them have never done any Windows xaml work and probably don't know such a thing as DockPanel even exists.

[IbraheemOsama]

I got this :)