Hi

When working with WPF I always found myself thinking how to handle Data formatting when a WPF control was bound to it. Let’s look at the following example of a window with a TextBlock that displays a DateTime:

   1: <Window x:Class="BindingFormat.Window1"

   2:     xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"

   3:     xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"

   4:     Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300">

   5:     <Grid>

   6:         <TextBlock Text="{Binding}"></TextBlock>

   7:     </Grid>

   8: </Window>

This article was written by Alan Mendelevich

The Problem

Creating a shape with bullets on the joints of it’s segments sounds like a really trivial task at a first glance. Just plaster some bullets on top of the shape. And it is really something like this until you decide you want to have transparent outlined bullets or opaque bullets with transparent outline around them. Like the ones in this picture:

Let me share you with one of the weirdest errors I ever encountered. Recently, I have been working on a distributed application which is built from a server and some clients. The clients are Windows Forms applications. Yesterday, I spent a whole day chasing a very weird and strange error - I was getting an exception at the main method (unhandled exception) of the client application. Here is what I got:

The error description was:

This article was written by Alan Mendelevich

Hi

Recently I’ve been working on a set of custom WPF controls.

There are numerous good books and articles about WPF in general and some basic information on custom control development but I have yet to find a good article (or book) with in-depth coverage of custom control development in general and design-time related issues in particular.

JQuery has simplified a lot of my day to day coding. I think it is an amazing little framework and apparently a lot of people do too. Even Microsoft is bundling it with its ASP.NET MVC framework which , as far as I know, a first for open source software. Beyond even handling all the all of the cross browse mess, my favorite part of jQuery is the ability to easily extend the framework through plug-in. That brings us to the topic for this post. We are going to look at how easy it is to create a plug-in for jQuery.

What Will Our Plugin Do?

For this post I want to pick something that is fairly simple yet demonstrates the power of plugins. For this post I am going to show you how to create a plug-in that will highlight keywords in a given block of text. Many websites use something similar when performing searches.

Hey all,

a while back we had 2 great posts and one page about visual studio shortcuts. The first one had a list of 10 Visual Studio Shortcuts and the second one had 11 Visual Studio Shortcuts. We also have a Visual Studio CheatSheet with all the Keyboard shortcuts Visual Studio has.

Here is another list of 5 Shortcuts I have picked up along the way.

Hey all.

Nothing new for this month so apart from reminding you that if you want to make a quick 30$ all you have to do is to drop us an good unique article (you can get more information on our Make Money Writing Articles Page). I will move on to the stats.

Here are March’s Stats:

Tab menus are a fairly common thing that I use in a lot of my applications. I like tabs because they help break up large chunks of, usually, related information.

At work we use RadControls for Telerik and they have a pretty nice tab menu control that is easy to use and looks good too. The only problem with these controls is that they only work in WebForms like even the default ASP.NET controls. So when I started playing with MVC I quickly realized I would need to spend some time building some of these controls myself.

Hi

I wanted to show the usage of these two very useful debugger attributes. If you don’t know them keep on reading, they are very useful.

DebuggerDisplay

This attribute allows you to customize the way an object is displayed. lets look at the following example:

Hi

Here is a problem that one of my colleagues who is just starting to use WPF got himself into. He was working on an application that displays items using an ItemsControl and uses a DataTemplate. Inside the DataTemplate he used an Image. Here is the Xaml code:

   1: <Window.Resources>

   2:         <Image Source="Creek.jpg" x:Key="IMG"></Image>

   3:     </Window.Resources>

   4:     <Grid>

   5:         <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding}">

   6:             <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate>

   7:                 <DataTemplate>

   8:                     <Border BorderThickness="2" BorderBrush="Black" 

   9:                             CornerRadius="3" MinHeight="10">

  10:                         <ContentControl Content="{StaticResource IMG}"/>

  11:                     </Border>

  12:                 </DataTemplate>

  13:             </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate>

  14:         </ItemsControl>

  15:     </Grid>

This is a much simpler example, but the principal is the same.

Can you see what was he doing wrong?