What exactly does Panel.IsItemsHost do?

Question

What does the Panel.IstItemsHost attached property used for?

I see plenty of examples of people setting it on the ItemsContainer template for an ItemsCo

Answer 1

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.controls.panel.isitemshost(v=vs.90).aspx

Essentially, what this post says is that if you are replacing the ControlTemplate of a ListBox and want a new layout, set IsItemsHost=true on some panel, e.g. a StackPanel. Then any items in the ListBox will be automatically added as children of the StackPanel. If the orientation of the ListBox is Horizontal, then the ListBox will be horizontal.

The other way is to set the ItemsPanel property of the ListBox to an ItemsTemplate and in that template you have a StackPanel. In this case the ListBox items will be added to the StackPanel children just as in the first case. However, you do not need to set IsItemsHost = true, it will have absolutely no effect. This is done for you by the fact that you are setting the ItemsPanel property.