Working with control templates

So far, we’ve been dealing with a hardcoded look and feel, but what if we want to offer more flexibility without forcing developers to rewrite or extend our control? By supporting control templates, we can expose the structure of our control’s visual tree, enabling both styling and structural changes while retaining its core functionality. This is an excellent way to ensure that our custom control seamlessly fits into a diverse array of user interfaces, providing an even greater degree of customization.

You might wonder how this is relevant to MVVM. Consider the following – a control template serves to separate the logic and behavior of a control from its visual representation, much like how MVVM achieves loose coupling between the ViewModel and the View. In this sense, the control effectively serves as a ViewModel for the control template. It exposes properties that the template binds to. The control template, in turn, can be...