Proposal: Add public APIs for creating FrameworkTemplate and derived types

Proposal: Add public APIs for FrameworkTemplate and derived types

Some scenarios for libraries are complexified when trying to create FrameworkTemplate and derived types, having to use XamlReader to create them.

Summary

Add the ability to create DataTemplate, ControlTemplate, and ItemsPanelTemplate types from code:

var dataTemplate = new DataTemplate(() => new TextBlock() { Text = "My text" });
var itemsPanelTemplate = new ItemsPanelTemplate(() => new StackPanel());
var controlTemplate = new ControlTemplate(typeof(ContentControl), () => new ContentPresenter());

Rationale

This will simplify the creation of Framework Templates and potentially improve performance by remove the parsing of literal XAML.

[baskren]

PLEASE add this feature ASAP.

[francoistanguay]

@jeromelaban Love the idea. FYI. Somewhat related to this - we wanted to simplify the story for virtualization in ItemsRepeater and introduced IElementFactory sometime back so that you are not required to provide a DataTemplate.

Would IElementFactory be used by ContentControl as well?

Otherwise pretty much back to square one,

Not being able to instantiate templates from C# is the main and almost only blocker to a C# first syntax.