In a Windows Store App I’m creating, I want to show the user various informational messages.  I picked a ListBox as the tool to show it so that they can scroll through them and all that good stuff. 

The messages are informational only, so there’s no need to provide all that extra whitespace around them since the user can never select them for anything.  The default behavior of the ListBox provides a substantial amount of padding and I wanted to get rid of it.  Well …. you can’t do that sort of thing on the ListBox directly.  HOWEVER, you can do it to the items you add:

        private void AddGameStateLogMessage(string theMessage)
        {
            TextBox t = new TextBox();
            t.Text = GameStateCounter++ + ": " + theMessage;
            t.TextWrapping = TextWrapping.Wrap;
            t.MinWidth = 400;
            Thickness thisPadding = new Thickness(5, 0, 5, 0);
            t.Padding = thisPadding;
            t.FontSize = 12;

            ListBoxItem li = new ListBoxItem();
            li.Content = t;
            li.MaxHeight = 25;
            thisPadding = new Thickness(5, 0, 5, 0);
            li.Padding = thisPadding;

            GameStateLog.Items.Insert(0,li);
        }

in the above, I’m creating a TextBox and setting its font, its padding, etc.

Next, I create a ListBoxItem and set its content to the formatted TextBox.

Finally, I insert the ListBoxItem into the ListBox.  (I want to show most recent messages at the top of the list, hence the Insert(0,li) instead of a simple Add() invocation.).

I will be tweaking this a bit before I’m really happy with the ListBox behavior but the pattern shown above has been very fruitful.  Hopefully someone else finds it helpful.

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