How do you do relative positioning in WPF?

Question

How can you relatively position elements in WPF? The standard model is to use layout managers for everything, but what if you want to position elements (on a Canvas, for exa

Answer 1

Instead of putting (as in your example) a button directly on the canvas, you could put a stackpanel on the canvas, horizontally aligned, and put the two buttons in there.

Like so:

<Canvas>
  <StackPanel Canvas.Left="100" Canvas.Top="100" Orientation="Horizontal">
    <Button>Button 1</Button><Button>Button 2</Button>
  </StackPanel>
</Canvas>

I think that it's quite flexible when you use more than 1 layout in a form, and you can create pretty much any configuration you want.

Answer 2

Good question. As far as I know, we need to have a different custom panel to get this feature. Since WPF is based on Visual Hierarchy there is no way to have this sort of Flat structure for the elements in the platform.

But Here is a trick to do this. Place your elements in the same position and give relative displacement by using RenderTransform.TranslateTransform. This way your TranslateTransfrom's X and Y will always be relatuve to the other element.