Justin DuJardin |O_o| |x_X| |-_-| |o_O|

Canvas Element Positioning Performance

C# and Silverlight provide a rich set of layout controls that can be used in constructing elegant user interfaces, including a do-it-yourself Canvas class that allows you to manually position elements on it’s surface.

Positioning Elements in Code

With a Canvas you’re almost always going to want to have some code that positions the child elements.  To move things about, the property you are concerned with is not, as you might expect, a Position or Left/Top property on the child element, but rather it is a property of the Canvas that can be set on a child element.

There are two ways I have seen used to set the Canvas.Left or Canvas.Top property on a child element, and in some cases you’ll want to distinguish between the two.

The first way is to call SetValue on the Child element with the DependencyProperty you want to set, Canvas.LeftProperty or Canvas.TopProperty.   The second way is to call Canvas.SetLeft or Canvas.SetTop and pass in the UIElement to set it on.