It could potentially be added. Recovering from a blunder I made while emailing a professor. GridStackPanel, ?DataContext, DataContext A Simple Pattern for Creating Re-useable UserControls in WPF / Silverlight I set my viewmodel datacontext the same way I observed Blend4 to. There are 3 ways to hook-up View with ViewModel. Now you have a DataContext which refers to your control so you can access any properties of that control using relative bindings. It's a fairly common developer practice to use imperative code (in code-behind) to set a page or user control's DataContext to a view model instance. For example, if one designs a simple progress report user control that has a progress bar with an overlaid message and a progress value, he might not discover problems with the design until he runs the application. Asking for help, clarification, or responding to other answers. You've violated the separation of concerns principle. Bindings have both a source and a target; where the binding framework is responsible for handling change notifications from the source and (optionally) the target, keeping the two synchronized. Did any DOS compatibility layers exist for any UNIX-like systems before DOS started to become outmoded? To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader. What about the xaml construction