Braulio Díez Botella

 Sometimes you need to enable / disable all the controls that are inside a StackPanel or a Grid depending on some conditions… well it seems something pretty straight forward until you realize that these elements does not have available the IsEnabled property …  ouch! What to do? Well… going control by control setting the IsEnabled property is a pain in the neck, encapsulating that elements in an user control can be an elegant solution but doesn’t fit to all scenarios (maybe is just a simple layout, or you don’t have the time to make all that refactoring). Is there any easier solution?...

Today googling into the Silverlight forums found a nice workaround (http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/t/85404.aspx) you can just wrap up your stackpanel or grid control inside a ContentControl

Let’s check how it works with a simple sample: We have the following layout / XAML:

 

Let’s Wrap the stack panel with the content template and set it’s IsEnabled property to false, gotcha !! we get the desired behavior with just two lines of code :).