WPF buttons same/recommended width

Question

Suppose you have a window with multiple buttons such as Ok/Cancel or Yes/No/Cancel. All the buttons need to be the same width. Obviously this could be done by just guessing a number and hardwiring all of them to that number.

Is there a better way to do it, one that would take into account preferred/recommended sizes (just how wide should an Ok button be anyway? This is not a rhetorical question, I actually don't know the answer!), what's needed by the text of the longest caption, what happens if the font size is increased etc?

Answer 1

Another, perhaps simpler, way to do this is to use the SharedSizeGroup property on the ColumnDefinition and RowDefinition classes.

Columns (and Rows) in a WPF Grid can automatically resize to fit their contents - when SharedSizeGroup is used, columns with the same group name share their resizing logic.

The Xaml would look something like this ...

<Grid Grid.IsSharedSizeScope="True">

    <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
        <ColumnDefinition Width="*" />
        <ColumnDefinition SharedSizeGroup="Buttons" />
        <ColumnDefinition SharedSizeGroup="Buttons" />
        <ColumnDefinition SharedSizeGroup="Buttons" />
    </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>

    <Grid.RowDefinitions>
        <RowDefinition Height="Auto" />
        <RowDefinition Height="*" />
    </Grid.RowDefinitions>

    <Button Grid.Column="1"
            HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"
            VerticalAlignment="Center"
            Content="Ok"
            Margin="4" />

    <Button Grid.Column="2"
            HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"
            VerticalAlignment="Center"
            Content="Cancel"
            Margin="4" />

    <Button Grid.Column="3"
            HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"
            VerticalAlignment="Center"
            Content="Long Button Caption"
            Margin="4" />
</Grid>