Posted in WPF, WPF Controls on May 13th, 2008
Transitionals is a WPF framework that allows you to integrate nice transition effects into your WPF application with very little effort. It’s gone live a few days ago on CodePlex and definitely worth checking out:
http://www.codeplex.com/transitionals
I’ve downloaded the library today in order to incorporate a little eye candy into a prototype I’m doing. However, what I [...]
Posted in .NET on May 13th, 2008
Scott Guthrie has posted a great summary about the various improvements of the upcoming SP1 for both Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. No matter what kind of development you’re currently involved with, there’s definitely something to be really looking foward to
A beta is available now, the final release can be expected this [...]
Posted in WPF on Apr 16th, 2008
Already tried to extend the Binding or BindingBase classes in order to write your own custom bindings? And failed because BindingBase.ProvideValue is sealed? Me too…
The result is a MarkupExtension that works around the issue that you cannot properly extend the Binding class. Basically, it allows you to write binding expressions with the usual syntax without [...]
Posted in WPF on Apr 16th, 2008
I’m currently working on a custom markup extension and came over a pretty nasty issue. Here’s the working XAML of a dummy extension:
<TextBox Name=”txtCity”
Foreground=”{local:ColorExtension Color=Red}”
/>
This works like a charm - the fore color is set to red as expected. However - as soon as I try to set the Color property through [...]
Posted in Open Source, WPF TreeView on Apr 7th, 2008
I’ve posted an update for my WPF TreeView which contains a bugfix and two new features:
The root item collection is now monitored for changes, and the tree updates itself automatically. This behaviour, however, can be controlled through the ObserveRootItems dependency property.
Built-in filtering support through a strongly typed predicate. I’m not completely [...]
Automatic properties in .NET 3.5 are a nice thing, but they are out of the equation if you want to take advantage of the almighty INotifyPropertyChanged interface which plays a crucial role in WPF. Here’s a set of ReSharper snippets that simplify interface implementation and property declaration.
Event Declaration
The first snippet just prints out an interface [...]
Posted in WPF on Mar 18th, 2008
Agreed - the WPF learning curve is steep, but once one figures out how the basics work, things tend to get amazingly easy. And of course, the emerging sets of toolkits dont’t hurt either.
Here’s another sample - a customer of mine needed a utility to maintain data in their web shop (MySql) and update the [...]
Posted in WPF Controls on Mar 14th, 2008
This is a pretty simple user control, which allows you to display a file dialog to open or save files. Its look can be easily adjusted, and it provides built-in truncation of the file string to a predefined length if necessary. Here’s the XAML for the above sample control:
<files:FileSelector x:Name=”openFileSelector”
[...]
Posted in WPF Controls on Mar 6th, 2008
Just saw that Blendables have extended their portfolio of WPF controls. The stuff looks good, but unfortunately, their licensing scheme doesn’t:
A license is required for each machine utilizing the blendables controls. [...] As we do not offer a deactivation method, if you must reactivate on a new developer machine you are allowed up to 3 [...]
Posted in WPF, WPF Controls, WPF TreeView on Mar 6th, 2008
If you have a WPF TreeView control that shows nested data, and you don’t want the user to select nodes that contain child nodes, you can solve this declaratively as TreeViewItem provides all we need:
HasItems dependency property (bool)
Focusable dependency property (bool)
As both properties have the same type, you can use a binding expression (needs inversion [...]