ListBox with customized Item in VB.NET - wpf

Question

I want to modify the original ListBox control that the each item to have a CheckBox, Labels and a Button control inside.
Is there any optimal method to make that? without making Custom Control from the very beginning?
Making custom control that inherits ListBox could be not a bad idea, but don't know how...
Thank you!
I tried WPF but it was too difficult at this time. Actually, designing the control via XAML was easy, but managing the list items(add/delete with texts, get event from the button in each item) wasn't.

Answer 1

Since the question is tagged [WPF] I'm going to provide a WPF answer:
The first thing any developer who faces WPF immediately tries to do is to use it as if it were winforms. This is a big mistake.
If you're working with WPF, you really need to leave behind the traditional aproach used in archaic technologies such as winforms, and understand and embrace The WPF Mentality.
in WPF, you don't "add/delete with texts, get event from the button in each item" or any of that, simply because UI is not Data.
Instead, you define a simple Data Model:
public class MyData
{
public string MyText1 {get;set;}
public string MyText2 {get;set;}
}
and then declaratively define Data Bindings in the UI to "show" this data to the UI as opposed to "reading" or "writing" data to/from the UI:
<Window x:Class="WpfApplication14.MainWindow"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
xmlns:local="clr-namespace:WpfApplication14"
Title="MainWindow" Height="350" Width="525">
<ListBox ItemsSource="{Binding}" HorizontalContentAlignment="Stretch">
<ListBox.ItemTemplate>
<DataTemplate>
<Border Margin="5" Background="LightCyan" BorderBrush="LightSkyBlue" BorderThickness="2">
<Grid>
<Grid.RowDefinitions>
<RowDefinition Height="Auto"/>
<RowDefinition Height="Auto"/>
<RowDefinition Height="Auto"/>
</Grid.RowDefinitions>
<Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
<ColumnDefinition/>
<ColumnDefinition/>
</Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
<Label Grid.Row="0" Grid.Column="0" Content="Text 1:" HorizontalAlignment="Right"/>
<Label Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="0" Content="Text 2:" HorizontalAlignment="Right"/>
<TextBox Grid.Row="0" Grid.Column="1" Text="{Binding MyText1}"/>
<TextBox Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="1" Text="{Binding MyText2}"/>
<Button Grid.Row="2" Grid.ColumnSpan="2" Content="Button" HorizontalAlignment="Center"/>
</Grid>
</Border>
</DataTemplate>
</ListBox.ItemTemplate>
</ListBox>
</Window>
And finally, you define the DataContext of the Window or View to a relevant instance or collection of such data:
public partial class MainWindow : Window
{
public MainWindow()
{
InitializeComponent();
DataContext = Enumerable.Range(0,10)
.Select(x => new MyData()
{
MyText1 = "Text1 - " + x.ToString(),
MyText2 = "Text2 - " + x.ToString()
});
}
}
All this results in:
See? really simple and beautiful.
Forget winforms, WPF Rocks. Just copy and paste my code in a File -> New Project -> WPF Application and see the results for yourself.

Answer 2

The best way to do this, short of using WPF, is to create a custom UserControl which represents each item that will go in the list. Then, add a FlowLayoutPanel to your form. Set the panel's AutoScroll property to True. Then set its FlowDirection property to TopToBottom. Then, dynamically create one of your custom controls for each item that you need to add to the list and call the panel's Controls.Add method to add them to the list.