#809 – You Can Use a Brush for a Control’s Background

A control’s Background property dictates how the background of the control is rendered.  It is set to an instance of a Brush object.  The two most common types of brushes are solid color brushes (SolidColorBrush) and brushes painted with a color gradient (GradientBrush).

You can use the shortcut of specifying one of the predefined colors for the value of the Background property.  This will cause the background to be rendered with a predefined SolidColorBrush of the specified color.

    <StackPanel>
        <Label Content="Hemingway" HorizontalAlignment="Center"
               Background="LightBlue"/>
        <Label Content="Fitzgerald" HorizontalAlignment="Center"
               Background="Thistle"/>
    </StackPanel>

You can also explicitly define a brush. The example below uses a LinearGradientBrush that ranges between two colors.

        <Label Content="Hemingway and Fitgerald" HorizontalAlignment="Center"
               Padding="20,10" Margin="10">
            <Label.Background>
                <LinearGradientBrush>
                    <GradientStop Color="LightBlue" Offset="0.0"/>
                    <GradientStop Color="Thistle" Offset="1.0"/>
                </LinearGradientBrush>
            </Label.Background>
        </Label>