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.

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?

Well we’ve arrived at the last part of our series on ASP.NET MVC. In this post we’ll be looking at Views, ViewData, and HTML Helpers. We’ll be discussing how to call Views from Controllers and how to use HTML Helpers to create your markup.

Views In A Nutshell

Suppose we receive the following request; http://yourdomain.com/Task/Show/23. The request would map to the following controller.

   1: public class TaskController : Controller 

   2: { 

   3:     public ActionResult Show() 

   4:     { 

   5:         return View(); 

   6:     } 

   7: } 

Hi

A while ago Shahar wrote an article about whether WPF Data Binding is Thread safe. Shahar’s findings were that Even if you change a property from a different thread the PropertyChanged event will be called on the UI Thread making Binding Thread Safe.

I have created a Window with 2 TextBlocks, one of them is binded to a Dependency Property and the other is binded to a regular property:

The Window:

   1: <StackPanel>

   2:     <TextBlock Text="{Binding DpTxt}" Width="100" Margin="5"></TextBlock>

   3:     <TextBlock Text="{Binding Txt}" Width="100" Margin="5"></TextBlock>

   4:     <Button Content="Change Text" Margin="5" Click="Button_Click"></Button>

   5: </StackPanel>

Hi

Where do you locate your convertors? do you put them in the Window.Resources section? or in the UserControl they are being used for? Neither of these options is good. You should put it in the App.Xaml file and here is why:

Lets look at the following example:

Here is our Window:

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

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

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

   4:         xmlns:my="clr-namespace:ConvertorLocation"

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

   6:     <Grid>

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

   8:             <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate>

   9:                 <DataTemplate>

  10:                     <my:UserControl1></my:UserControl1>

  11:                 </DataTemplate>

  12:             </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate>

  13:         </ItemsControl>

  14:     </Grid>    

  15: </Window>

Hi

Yesterday I was trying to create a control with a partially transparent background,. I am writing this because what I thought was so straight forward, was not.

Here is a simple example:

   1: <Grid>

   2:    <Button Height="23" Margin="94,103,109,0" Name="button1" 

   3:            VerticalAlignment="Top">Button</Button>

   4:    <Border Margin="57,61,21,101" Name="border1" 

   5:            Background="blue" />

   6: </Grid>

When we run this example we will get the following: