Creating template in codebehind is not a good idea, in theory one would do this by defining the ControlTemplate.VisualTree which is a FrameworkElementFactory.
ControlTemplate template = new ControlTemplate(typeof(Button));
var image = new FrameworkElementFactory(typeof(Image));
template.VisualTree = image;
Assigning properties is very roundabout since you need to use SetValue and SetBinding:
image.SetValue(Image.SourceProperty, ...);
Also, about the (previously) accepted answer and the stuff quoted:
Setting the ControlTemplate
programmatically is just like using
XAML because we have to use the
XamlReader class.
That statement is just wrong, we do not “have to”.
If i assign templates at run time i define them as a resource which i can load if i need it.
Edit: According to the documentation FrameworkElementFactory is deprecated:
This class is a deprecated way to programmatically create templates, which are subclasses of FrameworkTemplate such as ControlTemplate or DataTemplate; not all of the template functionality is available when you create a template using this class. The recommended way to programmatically create a template is to load XAML from a string or a memory stream using the Load method of the XamlReader class.
I wonder if this recommendation is such a good idea. Personally i would still go with defining the template as a resource in XAML if i can avoid doing it with strings and the XamlReader.