WPF on Ash Tewari

Announcing CodeDemo

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 01:58:22 +0000

It is a challenge to use code snippets in presentations, demos and live coding sessions. I have struggled with this and seen many speakers jumping through hoops to assimilate code snippets in their demos. I had to create something to ease this pain.

Today, I am announcing the general availability of CodeDemo. A tool for instructors, presenters and speakers who create instructional demos, record screen-casts or do live presentations. CodeDemo pastes code snippets into your favorite IDE without getting in your way.

I decided not to open-source CodeDemo to challenge myself to an exercise in commercialization. I decided to learn about entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, licensing and other aspects of software commercialization. It has been an MBA’s worth of education so far. This journey is not over yet. I am taking the Lean approach of creating a Minimum Viable Product. The future of CodeDemo, its feature set and the price, will be shaped by the traction it gets in the market, the feedback from the customers as well as patterns of use reported by the users.

Head over to http://codedemo.net to grab a copy for yourself. Let me know if find it useful - I will be very excited to hear from you.

Here is a quick 2 minute introduction to CodeDemo :

[youtube]aFn3boBAWjw[/youtube]

Remove ListBoxItem Highlighting

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 03:25:58 +0000

A Silverlight/Wpf ListBoxItem is highlighted when selected or when the mouse hovers over it.

I need to display a list of items that are not highlighted when selected. This is a common scenario when displaying an inactive list for simply listing out some information.

ListBoxItem’s default template can be easily inspected and modified using Expression Blend - Select a ListBoxItem in Objects and Timeline pane, Right click and select Edit template > Edit a Copy. Name you template and save it at the scope of your choice.

This will create a copy of the template and allow you to modify it. Switch to the xaml view. Locate the VisualStates of MouseOver, Selected and Focused, and blank them out -

The style is applied to the ListBoxItems using ItemContainerStyle -

Here is the xaml style for the ListBoxItem -

After the style is applied, the ListBoxItems are not highlighted when selected or focused. Here is a live demo of a ListBox that does not highlight when items are selected : remove-listboxitem-hlighting-demo

Using Model-View-ViewModel in WPF Applications

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:23:39 +0000

I am presenting at SoCalCodeCamp this weekend (January 30th, 2010) - Advanced WPF - Using Model-View-ViewModel in WPF Applications.

tasklist-mockup

Agenda :

1. Roles of the M-V-VM triad

2. Why use M-V-VM ?

3. Characteristics of the ViewModel

4. Build a Sample WPF Application using M-V-VM

Resources :

MSDN Magazine Article and Sample Application Download
Martin Fowler’s description of the ‘Presentation Model ‘
Jeremy Miller’s ‘Build Your Own CAB’ series

Dial Gauge is a ProgressBar

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:49:43 +0000

I am not just being philosophical here. In WPF, ControlTemplates allow you to transform a control’s appearance. This is not the same as applying stylesheets. This is an entirely new level of customization. What you see in the screenshot below looks like a Dial but is actually a simple ProgressBar control wearing a “Dial” template. The Dial template was created using Microsoft Expression Blend .

Include the ControlTemplate as a Window.Resource and then assign it to ProgressBar element’s Template attribute :

Of course that is not all. The ControlTemplate must define some named elements of FrameworkElement type. Charles Petzold has explained it in detail : MSDN Magazine Article. So, I will not repeat it here.

The sample code can be downloaded here : DialTest.zip License : Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Using Custom Converter in XAML

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 05:22:12 +0000

In my previous post : WPF-LINQ To SQL Sample, I had to resort to modifying .dbml file to get the images stored as varbinary into the WPF ListView control. I had to change the Type of image fields to System.Byte[], instead of using System.Data.Linq.Binary. A better way to do this is to use a custom converter. WPF allows you to specify custom converter as part of the Binding in .xaml, like this -

<Image Grid.Row="2"
Source="{Binding Path=ThumbNailPhoto ,
Converter={StaticResource imageConverter}}"></Image>

The custom converter is declared in the same .xaml file as a resource -

<Window.Resources>
<local:ImageDataConverter x:Key="imageConverter" />
</Window.Resources>

ImageDataConverter is implemented in .xaml.cs file -

public class ImageDataConverter : IValueConverter
{
 public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter,
 System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture)
 {
 byte[] image = ((System.Data.Linq.Binary)value).ToArray();
 return image;
 }

 public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter,
 System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture)
 {
 throw new NotSupportedException();
 }
}

The updated sample code can be downloaded here : WPF-LINQ to SQL Sample License : Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

WPF - LINQ to SQL Sample

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:15:35 +0000

This exercise in binding a WPF ListView control with LINQ to SQL was a lot of fun ! The following image shows data from AdventureWorks sample database displayed in the ListView control. The end result is very admirable, even in this very basic demo. Feeling a complete sense of freedom is unavoidable when working with WPF.

This sample demonstrates :

LINQ to SQL mapping.
WPF ListView Control DataBinding.
Displaying images stored in database as varbinary in WPF control.

The sample code can be downloaded here : WPF-LINQ to SQL Sample License : Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.