Apr 01, 2007

The power of Styles and Templates in WPF

In WPF, there is a very clean separation between the behavior of a Control and the look of a Control. For example, a Button’s behavior consists only of listening to Click events, but its look can be anything - you can make a Button look like an arrow, a fish, or whatever else suits your application. Redefining the look of a Control is very easy to do in VS with Styles and Templates, and even easier if you have Blend. In this sample, I will show you how…

by Zag Studio

- WPF

20 comments

Jan 11, 2007

How to get independent views of an ADO.NET source

I talked about binding to ADO.NET in an earlier blog post. In that post, I explained briefly how binding to ADO.NET behaves differently from other data sources when there are 2 or more views over the source. Today I will explain this scenario in more detail and will show a workaround that makes the binding to ADO.NET behave consistently with binding to other sources. Consider the scenario where we bind an ItemsControl to a CollectionViewSource whose Source property is set to some collection of objects. In this scenario,…

by Zag Studio

- WPF

12 comments

Nov 22, 2006

What is the difference between… ?

I had a blast at TechEd. After a few years working on WPF, it’s very rewarding to see people’s excitement when they discover all the features we offer. The high point of the conference for me (apart from several detours to the Belgian chocolate fountain, yum…) was Ian Griffiths’ presentation on data binding. If you haven’t seen Ian speak, you’re missing out! His presentation was well prepared, well delivered and technically accurate. I was also very excited to see that the WPF’s labs were incredibly popular, so popular…

by Zag Studio

- WPF

13 comments

Oct 29, 2006

How to data bind a Polygon’s Points to a data source – Part III

TechEd Barcelona is coming up next week, between Tuesday the 7th and Friday the 10th. Some members of the Avalon team will be there, and I’m very fortunate to be part of that group. If you read my blog and are attending this conference, come by and introduce yourself (don’t be shy!!). I will spend most of my time helping with the Avalon labs, but you may also find me in the Avalon booth. I can’t wait to meet some of you, hear about the applications you’ve been…

by Zag Studio

- WPF

11 comments

Oct 17, 2006

How to data bind a Polygon’s Points to a data source – Part II

In my last blog post, I talked about one solution to data bind a Polygon’s Points to a collection such that: Changes in the source are propagated to the UI. There is a clean separation between the UI and data layers. This solution is good for scenarios where big changes to the collection happen each time we want to refresh the UI, but not so good when we need to frequently add or remove one point only. The reason for this is that every time we raise a…

by Zag Studio

- WPF

6 comments

Oct 06, 2006

How to data bind a Polygon’s Points to a data source – Part I

Today I will talk about one solution for data binding the Points property of a Polygon to a source collection. The Polygon’s Points property is of type System.Windows.Media.PointCollection, which can be found in Avalon’s PresentationCore.dll. The first approach I’ve seen most people take when they want to bind the Points property to some data is to add a property of type PointCollection to their source, and bind to it. This works in the sense that the Polygon will display the Points it is binding to, but there are…

by Zag Studio

- WPF

6 comments

Sep 23, 2006

How to propagate changes across threads

I hope you didn’t get your hopes up too much when you read the title for this post. This time, instead of showing off what we support in our platform, I will explain to you what we don’t. The scenario I have in mind is when you want to bind a control in the UI thread to a collection or property that is modified in a different worker thread. My goal for this post is to tell you what works today and what doesn’t, and although no good…

by Zag Studio

- WPF

23 comments

Sep 09, 2006

How to control a color using Sliders

I will show you today how you can use four sliders (alpha, red, green, blue) to control the background color of a rectangle. This simple app allows the user to change the opacity and color of the rectangle by sliding each of the sliders. I started by defining a Rectangle with its Background set to a SolidColorBrush. The target of the Binding will be the Color property of this brush. The source is a little more complicated, since we have four sources for the same Binding. The Binding…

by Zag Studio

- WPF

8 comments

Sep 04, 2006

How to apply more than one filter

Today I will explain how you can apply more than one filter to a data bound view of a collection. I showed in my last post the two ways of filtering. CollectionViewSource allows us to filter by attaching an event handler to the Filter event (of type FilterEventHandler). You may be wondering what happens if we attach more than one filter event handler to the same CollectionViewSource’s Filter event. It turns out that each of the event handlers is called in the sequence they were attached, once for…

by Zag Studio

- WPF

2 comments

Aug 06, 2006

How to filter items from a collection

Today I will show you two ways of using the filter feature of data binding. There are two ObservableCollections of items in this sample. The first one contains a list of GreekGods, and the ListBox that displays it shows their Roman names. The second one contains a list of GreekHeroes. I will use these two collections to show two different ways of filtering items. I decided to filter out all items that start with “A” from the first collection. I started out by adding a new instance of…

by Zag Studio

- WPF

16 comments

Jul 20, 2006

How to encode XAML using a Value Converter

This blog post is especially useful for those of you that have your own blog. Several people have asked me about my solution for posting XAML markup, given that the < and > characters have to be encoded. With the amount of XAML I post, I certainly don’t replace them all by hand. As you probably guessed, I came up with a geeky solution that uses Avalon and Data Binding. The UI of my solution is as simple as it could be. It contains two TextBoxes, one where…

by Zag Studio

- WPF

10 comments

Jun 27, 2006

How to display items differently based on their properties

I had a blast at TechEd. It was great to connect with our customers face to face, hear what everyone had to say about Avalon, and bring the praise and feedback to the team. I am very proud of the technology we are building and I get really thrilled when I hear success stories from our customers. Our PMs are all amazing speakers and their talks were very well received by the audience. Kevin in particular did a great job at explaining the ins and outs of data…

by Zag Studio

- WPF

4 comments

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