#682 – Panel Elements Only Fire Mouse Events When Background Is Set

If you create an element derived from Panel, like Canvas, and wire up any of the mouse-related events, you’ll notice that you don’t see your events unless you’ve set the Background property of the Panel.  You will, however, see the routed events when a child element of the canvas originates the event.

In the example below, we don’t see MouseMove event on the Canvas unless we’re moving the mouse over one of the child Buttons.

    <Canvas MouseMove="Canvas_MouseMove">
        <Button Content="Preston Sturges" MouseMove="Button_MouseMove"
                Canvas.Left="10" Canvas.Top="10"/>
        <Button Content="John Ford" MouseMove="Button_MouseMove"
                Canvas.Left="10" Canvas.Bottom="10"/>
        <Button Content="Michael Curtiz" MouseMove="Button_MouseMove"
                Canvas.Right="10" Canvas.Top="10"/>
    </Canvas>

If you do want to see mouse events on a Panel, you need to explicitly set its Background property.  If you don’t want a background color, you can just set the property to Transparent.

    <Canvas MouseMove="Canvas_MouseMove" Background="Transparent">