Archive

Posts Tagged ‘WPF’

WPF NotifyIcon 1.0.5 Released

November 25th, 2013

I just published a maintenance release of my NotifyIcon control, which addresses a few (long due) issues, most notably for applications that target more recent versions of the .NET framework, or x64 applications.

Source code and samples can be downloaded via the control’s project page. Alternatively, there’s now also an official NuGet package for the control (binaries only) that contains builds for .NET 3.5 up to 4.5.1.

What’s next?

I already started working on a new version of the control. The most important feature will be interactive tooltips (so you can hover over them and interact with clickable content), along with a few minor new features. Check back in a few days/weeks, or follow me on Twitter in order to get the update once it’s released. Also, if you have specific feature requests, let me know!

 

Quick and dirty (but nice!) ToolTips – revisited and interactive

November 12th, 2013

 

Download sources, binaries, and sample application (Version: 1.0.1, 2013.11.22)

 

A few years ago, I posted an article that leveraged markup extensions to quickly show localized ToolTips with minimal effort. Fast forward to 2013: I still like ToolTips, but interactive / clickable ones would be nice, and there’s Blend Behaviors that provides developers with a great design-time experience. As a result, I wrote a simple control and a complementary Blend Behavior that get’s me quite a bit of flexibility with minimal impementation effort.

The behavior allows you very easily create simple ToolTips like this:

A simple ToolTip

 

However, it doesn’t stop there. The following Blend Behavior generates an error ToolTip:

Behavior properties in Expression Blend

 

ErrorToolTip

 

Also, unlike the built-in ToolTip service, the behavior supports interactive/clickable ToolTips. As the ToolTip takes arbitary XAML or a user control for Content or Header properties, you can display arbitrary controls on the popup.

InteractiveToolTip

 

Features at a glance:

  • Blend Behavior with design-time support – you can setup rich ToolTips within Blend in a matter of seconds.
  • Unlike regular ToolTips, those are clickable – you can put interactive content such as buttons or Hyperlinks on them.
  • Built-in header / content support.
  • Data Binding and MVVM-friendly.
  • Content and header not limited to text.
  • Built-in themes: You can show a ToolTip as an information, warning, or error.
  • If bound to strings, values can be formatted on the fly using the HeaderStringFormat and ContentStringFormat properties.
  • Disabling ToolTips through a bindable IsEnabled flag.

 

Some final notes: I didn’t make everything configurable – that would have been overkill for the scope of a ToolTip. Instead, I recommend you to tweak the control styles to your needs. Things you might want to change:

  • When being displayed, ToolTips are slightly transparent – full opacity is only set if you hover over them. You can easily adjust this in the animation that fades in the control.
  • If you shorten the delay in which the ToolTip is being displayed remarkably, you should also adjust animations (fade-in / fade-out in order to not cut them off.
  • Placement of the ToolTip’s popup (near Mouse pointer) is currently hardcoded in the Behavior class.

Happy coding 🙂

 

Announcing Sketchables – Rapid Mockup Creation with SketchFlow

May 24th, 2010

SketchFlow is a great addition to Blend, but I was missing the ability to create quick mockups of user interfaces. I’m a huge fan of productivity tools such as Balsamiq, and I was sorely missing its ease and speed in SketchFlow.

Meet Sketchables. Sketchables is a simple framework complemented by a set of controls that allow you to quickly create common controls in a matter of seconds. Here’s a screenshot from one of the samples, which was created in just a few minutes:

image

 

…and here’s a complementary recording that shows how the above mockup was created:

 

 

 

Sketchables will be free software, requires Blend 4 RTM and fully supports both WPF and Silverlight SketchFlow projects. Version 1.0 is approaching completion, so I hope I’ll be able to release it as soon as Blend 4 goes live.

Still time for you to slip in some last-minute feature requests though 😉

Input Focus from the View Model – Configured via Blend Behaviors

March 17th, 2010

Background / Focus of this Article

WPF wizard and fellow WPF Disciple Josh Smith published an article yesterday that showed how to control input focus from View Model objects using attached properties and a custom binding extension. Prior to the article, there was a discussion in the Disciples group, during which I looked into using Blend behaviors as an alternative configuration approach to Josh’s markup extension – this article here discusses this approach.

Accordingly, this posting is not about controlling input focus. Josh did all the legwork there, and you should check out the article on his blog. Everything that goes beyond the Behavior classes is Josh’s work, not mine  – I merely discuss a different approach regarding the declaration of focus control on the UI using Blend Behaviors.

 

Download Source Code and Sample Application

 

Differences

Let’s start by looking at the difference from a developer’s point of view. Assume you have a simple TextBox control that is bound to a FirstName property on the View Model:

<!-- simple textbox -->
<TextBox Text="{Binding FirstName}" />

 

Markup Extensions – One for the XAML Guys / Gals

Josh’s approach using a markup extension is a very lean way to wire up your control with the focus controller. If you’re used to coding in XAML, this is pretty much the quickest way to get things running. Note that only the Binding keyword was replaced by a the custom FocusBinding markup extension:

<!-- simple textbox -->
<TextBox Text="{jas:FocusBinding FirstName}" />

 

If you’re working in Visual Studio, this is the way to go (even more so if you have ReSharper to take care of the namespace declarations for you). It might become tedious, however, if’ you’re working in a Blend environment: For one thing, there’s the namespace declarations. And then, you can no longer wire up your bindings directly in Blend on the designer surface.

 

Blend Behaviors – Designer’s Flavor

The Blend Behaviors don’t require you to write any XAML at all. The data binding itself remains unchanged, and the TextBoxFocusBehavior was just dragged/dropped on the TextBox in Blend. Accordingly, you can set up both binding and input focus control with a few mouse clicks without having to leave the designer surface:

image

 

If you look at XAML source, you’ll notice that the Behavior above actually produces substantially more markup – this isn’t something you’d want to type in manually:

<TextBox Text="{Binding FirstName}" >
    <i:Interaction.Behaviors>
        <FocusVMLib_Behaviors:TextBoxFocusBehavior/>
    </i:Interaction.Behaviors>
</TextBox>

 

In order to compare the two approaches, just download the attached sample and have a look at the two Window classes. Window1 is the original implementation (using the markup extension), Window2 uses the Blend behaviors. The end result is the same – the only difference is the different declaration approaches.

 

The Behavior Classes

The rest of this blog post discusses the implementation of the behavior classes, and suggests an approach to support different control types.

Read more…

Author: Categories: WPF Tags: ,

Making WPF Popups Work in Windowless Applications

September 23rd, 2009

I’ve first encountered this issue with my WPF NotifyIcon, and now again while writing a plug-in for Windows Live Writer: If you try to display a WPF popup without any Windows open (the Popup is the only UI component there is), certain controls such as TextBox, ListView, or ListBox don’t receive proper mouse and/or keyboard input, and cannot be selected.

The reason for this issue is buried in the WPF framework, and how it interacts with Windows. Fellow WPF Disciple Andrew Smith pointed me in the right direction:

 

…because a Popup’s HWND has the WS_EX_NOACTIVATE so the WPF framework will not attempt to actually focus the associated hwnd (because its usually used with a window and you don’t want to deactivate the window when you focus something in the popup).

 

Accordingly, you’ll have to fiddle with Windows Interop to make things work. Here’s the snippet:

 

public static class WinApi
{
  /// <summary>
  /// Gives focus to a given window.
  /// </summary>
  [DllImport("USER32.DLL")]
  public static extern bool SetForegroundWindow(IntPtr hWnd);


  public static void ActivatePopup(Popup popup)
  {
    //try to get a handle on the popup itself (via its child)
    HwndSource source = (HwndSource)PresentationSource.FromVisual(popup.Child);
    IntPtr handle = source.Handle;

    //activate the popup
    SetForegroundWindow(handle);
  }
}
Author: Categories: WPF, WPF Controls Tags:

Snippet Time: Helper Libraries for C# / WPF

September 14th, 2009

I just made a few minor updates to two libraries which assemble as set of helper classes for C# and WPF and thought: Why not share them? The libraries aren’t really intended to be used directly in your code, but you might find one or another helper method or snippet that might make a nice addition to your own toolbox 🙂

 

Hardcodet.Commons (C#, .NET 3.5)

Common helper classes and snippets (simple base classes, file management, weak events, extension methods etc.)

 

Hardcodet.Wpf.Commons (C#, .NET 3.5)

Stuff I commonly use in WPF projects, such as checking for design time, base classes for commands and converters, data binding helpers and other stuff.

 

I’ll keep these libraries up-to-date, version history will be posted here.

 

History:

2009.09.14  Initial blog release

Author: Categories: C#, Open Source, WPF Tags: , ,