Positioning items on X and Y within an ItemsControl

Download demo project

If you need to overlay points of interest on a map or distribute usercontrols on a game board, you can foreach over the items and add them to a placeholder. But all this can be accomplished much easier with an ItemsControl that has a Grid or Canvas as its ItemsPanelTemplate. First let me show you what this demo project does:

Steps to create this

Create a model to hold the name and position of the label:

public class Location {
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public double X { get; set; }
    public double Y { get; set; }
}

Place an ItemsControl and edit the DataTemplate and ItemsPanelTemplate:

<ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Locations}">
    <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate>
        <DataTemplate>
            <Grid HorizontalAlignment="Left" Background="#FFFF0069" RenderTransformOrigin="0.5,0.5" Height="30">
                <Grid.RenderTransform>
                    <CompositeTransform Rotation="-45" TranslateX="{Binding X}" TranslateY="{Binding Y}"/>
                </Grid.RenderTransform>
                <Rectangle Fill="#FFFF0069" RenderTransformOrigin="0.5,0.5" Width="15" Height="15" HorizontalAlignment="Right" Margin="0,0,-3,0">
                    <Rectangle.RenderTransform>
                        <CompositeTransform Rotation="45"/>
                    </Rectangle.RenderTransform>
                </Rectangle>
                <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Left" TextWrapping="Wrap" Text="{Binding Name}" d:LayoutOverrides="Height" FontFamily="Arial Black" FontSize="16" Margin="2"/>
            </Grid>
        </DataTemplate>
    </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate>
    <ItemsControl.ItemsPanel>
        <ItemsPanelTemplate>
            <Grid/> // this is a StackPanel by default
        </ItemsPanelTemplate>
    </ItemsControl.ItemsPanel>
</ItemsControl>

The trick here is to use a Grid in the ItemsPanelTemplate and bind the TranslateX and TranslateY to the X and Y of the model.

Create an ObservableCollection<Location>

public ObservableCollection<Location>  Locations { get; set; }
public MainViewModel() {
    Locations = new ObservableCollection<Location>();
    Locations.Add(new Location { Name = "London", X = 175, Y = 35 });
    Locations.Add(new Location { Name = "Eindhoven", X = 240, Y = 40 });
    Locations.Add(new Location { Name = "Muenchen", X = 330, Y = 100 });
}

Bind it to the ItemsControl.

<ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Locations}">

Does not work on the Windows Phone yet

You can only bind to dependency properties which the CompositeTransform properties are not in Silverlight 3 so this does not work on a pre-mango Windows Phone.