<p>How can I prevent a user from resizing GridViewColumns withing a ListView control?</p>

i found a solution and probably it will help someone else someday ;)
you have to override the GridViewColumnHeader's ControlTemplate (default template is
here
) and remove the
PART_HeaderGripper
from the template in order to prevent resizing of your columns.
there is another solution that comes up with subclassing GridViewColumn described
here
. for representation purposes i prefer xaml only solutions though