WPF Statusbar with dynamic content in MVVM
<p>I want to create a way to flexibly display status information and possibly also including interactive features, like retrying an operation if there was an error. In my opinion that is too big of a task for the main window where my status bar is currently managed. </p>

<p>That's why I want to have the statusbar as own view with a viewmodel, as well as a model that is responsible for creating the different status objects later managed by the viewmodel. Depending on the size of the resulting code, I'd maybe even merge the model and viewmodel using just the viewmodel for everything, though at the moment I'm unwilling to give other parts of my application direct access to a viewmodel.</p>

<p>My question is: What is the best way to move my statusbar in an own view with viewmodel? </p>

<p>I was thinking about using a content control in the MainWindow.xaml which gets the viewmodel with databinding, and associates the view with an DataTemplate located in the Window.Resources (I display all my viewmodels like this, currently). What I don't know, is whether this works out like I want it to. Since I'm new to WPF I'm not sure if there are any implications with using a ContentControl for displaying a statusbar.<br />
Another idea was to create a usercontrol or if this doesn't work even a derivate of Statusbar to achieve the result, if the ContentControl doesn't work.</p>

<p>Since the approaches are fairly different, I'd like to get some hints before starting, to avoid having to refactor everything later.</p>