I’m doing a bit of WPF at the moment for a company in Sydney and also working on a WPF project in my spare time. Tonight I came across this issue and thought I’d document the simple solution in case I run into it again in the future.

I have a ListView that takes up the full width of my window. I’ve edited the ListViewItem template to put a border around the items. The code looked like this:

<ListView BorderThickness="0">
                <ListView.ItemTemplate>
                    <DataTemplate>
                            <Border Margin="10" Padding="8" BorderBrush="Red" Background="GhostWhite" CornerRadius="12">
                                          ……. my content here ….
                            </Border>
                    </DataTemplate>
                </ListView.ItemTemplate>
</ListView>

The problem was that the border was only as big as the content inside it, even though the listview was the width of the window. What I wanted was to show an equal sized border for each item despite the size of the content inside.

The solution in the end was really quite simple: to add the HorizontalContentAlignment="Stretch" attribute to the ListView declaration. Easy!