How to create a repeating background with xaml elements in silverlight?

Question

I want to create an area in my application that looks draggable. Usually, you see this done with a background of small dots or squares, or sometimes lines. I'm using Silverlight and I want to simply create a background that is a set of repeating small rectangles. I honestly cannot figure out how to generate a background with xaml. I'd rather not have to create every little rectangle -- this will also cause the control not to scale. Is there some way to repeat xaml elements to form a pattern? This would be similar to CSS repeating backgrounds, but I would like to use xaml instead of images.

Answer 1

You can use a brush, like this:

<Rectangle>
    <Rectangle.Fill>
        <LinearGradientBrush EndPoint="6,6" StartPoint="2,2" SpreadMethod="Repeat" MappingMode="Absolute">
            <GradientStop Color="#FFAFAFAF" Offset="0"/>
            <GradientStop Color="#00FFFFFF" Offset="1"/>
            <GradientStop Color="#00FFFFFF" Offset="0.339"/>
        </LinearGradientBrush>
    </Rectangle.Fill>
</Rectangle>

I've nicked this particular example from the excellent blacklight project, you'll need to play around with all the different settings to see what does what. I'm guessing a radial brush will allow you to get dots, etc. I think they created it in blend as all the numbers were crazy decimals until I sanitised them a bit.