Apr 04, 2010

How to update LabeledPieChart to use the latest toolkit

67PieChartWithLabelsUpdated

A few months ago I blogged about a behavior that adds labels to a pie chart in Silverlight or WPF. I wrote a post showing the usage of that behavior, another one explaining the implementation details of the WPF version, and another one explaining issues encountered when porting it to Silverlight. Since those posts were written, a new version of the charting APIs came out with improvements that help simplify the labeled chart code. By popular request, this blog post explains how I updated the WPF and Silverlight…

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by Zag Studio
3 comments
Mar 20, 2010

How to sort a hierarchy

Today’s blog post discusses how you can sort data items at each level of a hierarchical user interface in WPF and Silverlight. Instead of just giving you the final solution, I will first show a few approaches that you might expect to work, and I’ll explain why they don’t work. All of the approaches will use a single data source: a list of State objects, each of which contains a list of County objects, each of which in turn contains a list of City objects. I’ll assume you’re…

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by Zag Studio
1 comment
Nov 16, 2009

Silverlight’s CollectionViewSource

60SLCollectionViewSource

In my last post, I explained the reasoning behind adding CollectionViewSource to WPF. In this post I will talk about CollectionViewSource in Silverlight (introduced in Silverlight 3) and compare it with its WPF counterpart. If you recall from my last post, CollectionViewSource was added to WPF mainly to permit view-related scenarios to be expressed in XAML (so they could be tooled), and also to aid in remembering the current item of previously displayed collections. The reasons for adding CollectionViewSource to Silverlight were very different. Before the introduction of…

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by Zag Studio
4 comments
Sep 20, 2009

How to port the WPF labeled pie chart to Silverlight

Update April 4 2010: The LabeledPieChart code in this post has been updated to the latest WPF and Silverlight toolkits. You can find more details in this blog post. Two posts ago I showed a possible solution to add labels to a WPF pie chart. In my last post, I explained some implementation details of that solution. In this blog post, I will show the steps I took to port the labeled pie chart to Silverlight. The Silverlight and WPF teams do their best to ensure that porting…

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by Zag Studio
16 comments
Jul 26, 2009

Data virtualization

52DataVirtualization

My last post covered the current UI virtualization support on Silverlight and WPF. In this post, I will discuss another technique that helps improve performance when dealing with large data sets: data virtualization. A control that uses data virtualization knows to keep in memory no more data items than the ones needed for display. For example, if a data-virtualized ListBox is data bound to 1,000,000 data items and only displays 100 at a single point in time, it only keeps about 100 data items in memory. If the…

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by Zag Studio
30 comments
Jul 11, 2009

UI Virtualization

51UI

Today’s post is motivated by a scenario that’s common in business applications: displaying and interacting with a large data set. We’ll quickly run into performance problems if we use the naïve approach of loading the entire data set into memory and creating UI elements for each data item. Fortunately, there are some things we can do to make sure our applications perform well, even with extremely large data sets. The first approach is called “UI virtualization.” A control that supports UI virtualization is smart enough to create only…

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by Zag Studio
29 comments
Dec 30, 2008

How to expand items in a TreeView – Part III

49ExpandTreeViewPart3

This is the third of a three-part series about expanding TreeViewItems. In the first post I explained how to use an implicit Style to expand all TreeViewItems at load time. In the second post I showed how you can drive expansion and selection of items using an intermediate data source. In this post, I will explain how you can expand and select TreeViewItems using the dispatcher. Expanding all TreeViewItems by setting the IsExpanded property on the items directly is not as simple as doing a tree walk and…

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by Zag Studio
3 comments
Nov 13, 2008

How to expand items in a TreeView – Part II

48ExpandTreeViewPart2

For those of you in Europe, I will be giving a talk at the Oredev conference in Malmo, Sweden, on Thursday the 20th of November. I hope I’ll get to meet some of you there. In my last post, I showed how you can expand all items in a TreeView at load time. In WPF, this can be done by simply adding an implicit style to the resources, and in Silverlight we need a little help from ImplicitStyleManager to achieve the same behavior. However, applications typically allow more…

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by Zag Studio
6 comments
Oct 29, 2008

How to expand items in a TreeView – Part I

47ExpandTreeViewPart1

Exciting! Yesterday, the new Silverlight Toolkit (the team I now work for) was made available in CodePlex. This was announced by Scott Guthrie in his PDC keynote and by my manager Shawn Burke in his blog. We created the Silverlight Toolkit to provide developers with a set of reusable components that maximize productivity and help take Silverlight to the next level. The toolkit is available under the Microsoft Public License, so we provide the full source code (as well as tests and samples), and encourage you to reuse…

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by Zag Studio
7 comments

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All code snippets and downloads in this blog are licensed under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL).