Consider a scenerio , we have a listbox and some process where we have a tab navigation. On select of a tab, pass some inteeger value to a hidden textbox in the xaml . now based on the tab selected, we can switch the same listbox with different data template. This will avoid creating 2 listboxes in Silverlight 3 application.

the below code will explain in detail :

<ListBox x:Name="listbox1">

<ListBox.ItemTemplate>

<DataTemplate>

<ContentControl Content="{Binding}" Loaded="ContentControl_Loaded"/>

</DataTemplate>

</ListBox.ItemTemplate>

</ListBox>

<DataTemplate x:Key="datatemplate01">

<StackPanel>

<TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}"/>

<TextBlock Text="{Binding Dept}"/>

</StackPanel>

</DataTemplate>

<DataTemplate x:Key="datatemplate02">

<StackPanel>

<TextBlock Foreground="Blue" Text="{Binding Name}"/>

<TextBlock Foreground="Blue" Text="{Binding Address}"/>

</StackPanel>

</DataTemplate>

private void ContentControl_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

{

ContentControl mycontentcontrol= (ContentControl)sender;

Data emp= (Data) mycontentcontrol.DataContext;

if (hiddentxt.Text ==1)

{

mycontentcontrol.ContentTemplate = (DataTemplate)this.Resources["datatemplate01"];

}

else if(hiddentxt.Text ==2)

{

mycontentcontrol.ContentTemplate = (DataTemplate)this.Resources["datatemplate01"];

}

}