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Create a new user control (Windows Phone)

You can design your own customized controls that you can reuse multiple times in a project. These controls inherit from the UserControl class and therefore do not use templates. However, you can control the appearance of your user control by designing it from scratch.

To create an empty user control

  1. Open a project.

  2. On the File menu, click New Item (Ctrl+N).

  3. In the New Item dialog box, select UserControl.

  4. Next to Name, type a descriptive name for your user control.

Tip

In Blend for Visual Studio 2012, a code-behind file is automatically created for all the items added using the New Item dialog except when adding a Resource Dictionary.

  1. Click OK to close the dialog box and open the user control for editing.

    You can now design the look of your user control.

To draw a new instance of your user control in a document in your project

  1. Save all your files (Ctrl+Shift+S).

  2. Build your project (Ctrl+Shift+B) to make the user control appear in the Assets panel.

  3. In the Tools panel, click Assets .

  4. In the Assets panel, in the Project tab, select your user control.

  5. Using your mouse, draw your user control on the artboard.

Tip

Use the Make Into Control command to make a control template from selected objects. You can select objects on the artboard, group them into a layout panel such as a Grid, and then click Make Into Control on the Tools menu. The Make Into Control command does not create a user control. Instead, it creates a control style that contains a template made up of the objects that you selected. To draw another control of the same kind, select your style in the Styles category of the Assets panel, and then draw on the artboard.

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