Pro WPF in C# 2010: Windows Presentation Foundation in .NET 4

20.5. Data Templates

Styles give you some basic formatting abilities, but they don't address the most significant limitation of the lists you've seen so far: no matter how you tweak the ListBoxItem, it's only a ListBoxItem, not a more capable combination of elements. And because each ListBoxItem supports just a single bound field (as set through the DisplayMemberPath property), there's no room to make a rich list that incorporates multiple fields or images.

However, WPF does have another tool that can break out of this rather limiting box, allowing you to use a combination of properties from the bound object and lay them out in a specific way or to display a visual representation that's more sophisticated than a simple string. That tool is the ...