The Canvas is usually an underestimated layout control in Silverlight, instead it's really useful and flexible; one the most usefull things I have discovered while playing with Silverlight is to build pages using a Canvas as the most external container and place any other layout control inside it.

Why? it has a very nice and easy support for Z-Indexing and if you diplay some controls/forms/whatever on top of each other is a very simple task to realize. You can easily build a window-like desktop application in this way.

So here's the way in which I usually define my silverlight pages/applications.

<UserControl x:Class="ContextMenuExtender.Page"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" 
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" 
   >
    <Canvas x:Name="surface">
        <StackPanel x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">
            ...
        </StackPanel>
    </Canvas>
</UserControl>

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