With all of the new features introduced in Silverlight 3, it’s easy to see how some features get very little coverage (or no coverage at all). The ItemContainerGenerator is one of those features. When building controls based upon the ItemsControl, there are many cases when you need to obtain the container for a particular item. To perform this task in Silverlight 2, you had to develop your own crude implementation of the ItemContainerGenerator. Fortunately for us, the ItemContainerGenerator is now baked right in!
The ItemContainerGenerator for a particular ItemsControl is exposed by the ItemContainerGenerator property:
The Silverlight Toolkit team built their own version of the ItemContainerGenerator (located in ItemContainerGenerator.cs in SL2 Source) to support the TreeView control. However, in the recent Silverlight 3 release, this class has been removed and the TreeView control has been updated to take advantage of the built-in version.