Dynamic controls in WPF MVVM

I have an app with MVVM which works fine. Now I want to replace one of my controls with a dynamic control. By dynamic I mean that I have no idea what control this is, only that it is a GUI control. It could be somethi开发者_StackOverflowng as simple as a image, or a custom third party user control that will be created by someone else after this app is done.

Can someone shed some light on how this can be achieved in MVVM? I've done it before a long time ago using ListBox or similar (iirc) to generate GUI elements (don't remember details). But I'd like to learn the theory behind it this time.

Edit:

Lets say the View contains a list of instances of for example System.Windows.UIElement. I want to display all of these UI controls on a surface (for instance in a stacked control).

You could create a View that exposes a Content property as a placeholder (so a ContentControl might be all that is needed) The content property could then be set to the dynamic control.

You would have to add a little reflection to dynamically load the assembly and instantiate the required control.

The dynamically loaded control would have to access the data by using the DataContext property. If the dynamic control is MVVM too it might have its own ViewModel so you would have to find a way to load that too (reflexction again?) and point the DataContext of the control to the loaded ViewModel.

Does this make sense, is this what you are looking for?