January 19, 2010
December 28, 2009
VisualStateManager's Benefits
November 26, 2009
Death by Silverlight
Yes, this title is influenced by death by chocolate, where in you get an overdose of chocolate. At this time I feel exactly the same for Silverlight (SL). With just over 2 years since the first version made its mark felt, Silverlight has come a long long way. Ironically, as part of TechDays event hosted specifically at our campus, we talked a lot about SL3 and right then, across the ocean, at PDC 2009, Microsoft just unveiled SL4 beta bits.
When we started looking at SL 1.0 back in late 2007, it had limited feature set with XAML support, and most work had to be done in java script. It looked more of media (video) playback at that time. MS called it their RIA platform, but it didn't offer much at that time. With SL2 at PDC 2008 and SL3 just earlier this year in July 2009, a host of features have found their way in the platform. Along with multitude of controls, to .net language support, to IIS Smooth streaming, to perspective 3D, to out of browser experience, SL is a technology you just cannot ignore.
November 03, 2009
Presentation - which tool to use?
October 15, 2009
Sketchflow
I have been busy with various other non-technical work for few months and hence didn't get a chance to experiment anything new Off late. I finally managed to find time and check out Sketchflow. Sketchflow is a new tool available along with Expression 3 Suite which allows quick and easy prototyping. It allows one to create prototypes that are very near real appliation like, but still retain their prototype look and feel (by using wiggly styled controls) and allow for easy feedback back and forth between you and your customers.
If you have't seen this as yet, you can get a very good idea on it by checking out the following
1. Keynote video from MIX 09, where Jon Harris showed a very interesting Sketchflow prototype. You can skip to about 1 hr 39 min into the video to directly jump to this part
2. From Concept to Production video, another session from MIX 09, by Christian Schormann, where he walks through a snowboard sketchflow prototype. This and the keynote video code comes as part of samples with Blend 3.
3. A very good step by step walkthrough of Sketchflow is available at the dynamic prototyping site.
I am enjoying working with Sketchflow.
June 11, 2009
WPF - Performing Conditional Validation
When we look at conditional validation needs in WPF, the typical option that people talk about is the usage of UpdateSourceTrigger property in binding expression. There are many examples that one can find on setting this to explicit and managing the validation or things like setting this to PropertyChange when validating textbox input without having to focus out of it.
However there can be scenarios where you can't use explicit since you want the normal two way binding behavior, but have a need to validate based on value of some other control. I had a similar scenario the other day where we had a combo box with yes/no options and the validation had to happen only if a value of "yes" was selected in the combo box.
Continue reading "WPF - Performing Conditional Validation" »
April 24, 2009
WPF, XBAP, Silverlight - What do I use?
Microsoft introduced Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) with .NET framework 3.0. What started as extensions to Visual Studio (VS) 2005 is a now a in-house native to VS 2008 and the VS 2010 designer is itself getting implemented in WPF (more details in Jason's blog here).
Needless to say that WPF is very powerful new presentation platform that really makes "imagination is the limit" a reality. Designers and developers can now work real closely like never before and create some really super cool user experiences.
Continue reading "WPF, XBAP, Silverlight - What do I use?" »
March 19, 2009
Blend 3 and SL 3 Preview available
February 20, 2009
Silverlight 2 GDR 1
January 27, 2009
Should developers touch XAML?
January 07, 2009
Silverlight - EnableRedrawRegions is a savior !
The other day we were ready to deploy an internal facing Silverlight 2.0 built application. As a final round of testing, I thought to put to use the EnableRedrawRegions settings that I had just learnt from Seema's talk in PDC 2008 as part of her session - Building an Optimized, Graphics-Intensive Application in Microsoft Silverlight.
Interestingly, after the application loaded, I could see a small portion in the middle of the page continuously changing colors. It could only mean that this region was getting redrawn again and again. But why? Checking the code we realized that we had some animation at load time and once the data was loaded, the animating panel was just pushed to back in Z order and another panel came on top. But this still meant that the animation was happening, but we could not see it. This EnableRedrawRegions flag really helped immediately identify and remove unwanted animation (we set the panel's visibility to collapsed).
November 28, 2008
Silverlight and Matrix Transformation
November 21, 2008
Silverlight Theming
If you have been following updates on Silverlight (SL) 2, you would already be aware of SL 2 Toolkit on codeplex. Scott in his blog has shared some amazing numbers on usage of SL and also given some indicators to where SL is headed in its next version.
I had been away from SL for some time due to other focus areas. However I decided to try my hands on the support for themes, a feature added with SL Toolkit.
October 13, 2008
Silverlight 2 RTM
Some days back Microsoft had released the RC0 version of Silverlight. Considering that PDC 2008 is just about 2 weeks away, there was much speculation that that's when Silverlight 2 will RTM. But according to Mary-Jo, the release is very much expected later today. Keep an eye on Scott's blog for the announcement.
[Update: 14 Oct 4.20 am] The download should be available in the next few hours. Check the press release.
[Update: 14 Oct 9.00 am] Silverlight 2 is now available. To install the runtime, visit here. For related developer tools, visit here.
October 01, 2008
Part 2: Manage Page level states with VisualStateManager in Silverlight
In part 1 we saw how using basic storyboarding/animation capabilities in Silverlight, we created a simple application where buttons move to new location when clicked and move back when another button is clicked. In this part we will see how using VSM, we can build the same capabilities with lesser animations and lesser code. The complete code (including code for part 1) can be downloaded from here - Download file. Note that I have built this using SL 2.0 RC0, but the concepts explained here will work with Beta 2 bits as well.
Continue reading "Part 2: Manage Page level states with VisualStateManager in Silverlight" »
September 30, 2008
Part 1: Manage Page level states with VisualStateManager in Silverlight
Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 introduced the concept of Visual State Manager (VSM). If you haven't checked it out still, here are some articles that will get you started.
VSM not only helps keep the looks and behavior of a control separate, it allows you to manage the various states the control can be in, along with the transitions, in a very clean and effective manner. Though most of the examples online today show this in context of a specific control and working with its control template, there is no reason why this can't be applied to the UserControl itself, i.e. at the Page level. You can very easily create custom states for your page and manage transitions between the states. In fact this can actually help reduce the total animations that you may have to write and also simplify the backend code.
Continue reading "Part 1: Manage Page level states with VisualStateManager in Silverlight" »
September 29, 2008
Silverlight 2.0 RC0 Installation
You would already be aware of the release of RC0 of Silverlight 2.0. If not check Scott's blog here. The details on the links for downloading these latest bits can be found in the same blog.
Note that unlike the previous Beta 2, this version doesn't comes with a go live license and if you visit the Silverlight installer page online, you will see that it still points to the earlier Beta 2 version (2.0.30523.8).
July 10, 2008
Silverlight - Preventing direct editing in DatePicker control
In my earlier blog I mentioned about the custom DatePicker control. Towards the end where I mentioned about making the textbox read only, I also mentioned about not being able to edit this template in Expression Blend 2.5 June CTP. On the forums, someone clarified that since this control doesn't resides in System.Windows.dll, its template cannot be edited in current version of Blend.
One can however include the template as mentioned in MSDN and include that in the project and modify suitably. When I included that in a test project, I ended up with System.Stack.OverflowException. That can however be fixed easily as I mentioned here.
Continue reading "Silverlight - Preventing direct editing in DatePicker control" »
WPF - Text clips on some Vista machines
I love mysteries. So when a project team approached me the other day with an issue with their WPF application, I immediately jumped into it. The issue they were facing was really mysterious. Their WPF application was working and looking fine on all their Vista machines, but when shared with Client, it started to have problems. Text in some controls was clipping.
After trying on multiple machines locally, they found 1 Vista machine where the problem was reproduced. The mystery was that all these machines were using same resolution (1024x768), same dpi (96) and same theme, but text would clip on that 1 machine and work fine on all others. They were about to write this off claiming some issue with Vista.
Continue reading "WPF - Text clips on some Vista machines" »
July 09, 2008
Silverlight - Handling Start and End dates with Custom DatePicker Control
When working with DatePicker controls in application, very typically they get used to manage start and end dates. Like recently I was writing a tracking application in Silverlight and had the need to manage allocation and deallocation and hence start and end dates. There are typical requirements also associated with such implementations like start date cannot be in past, end date cannot be before start date.
Implementing this with Silverlight DatePicker controls was fairly trivial. If you haven't used these controls, you can find an introduction to them here. These controls also offer other interesting properties that I played with namely DisplayStartDate. I then thought that some of things I did in the logic, would be useful in multiple scenarios, so why not create a new custom DatePicker control that will have these functionalities in-built.
Continue reading "Silverlight - Handling Start and End dates with Custom DatePicker Control" »
July 04, 2008
Silverlight - Animating Wrap Panel
Panels, as we know, are pretty much the basis of building any Silverlight application. They help arrange the other Silverlight controls in specific manner like Stack allowing you to stack controls either horizontally or vertically, Grid allowing you to position controls in rows an columns and Canvas giving you a free flow behavior. This blog however isn't however a primer on panels and you can easily find information about them on the net. Check this for information on how to layout controls using these various panels.
At Mix 2008, in one of the sessions the AnimatingStackPanel was demonstrated. I found the code for the same here. I decided to go ahead and try this. However my requirement was for a wrap panel and not a stack panel. I found one here. This would serve my purpose but there wasn't any animation in it. In my earlier work with WPF, I had looked at Kevin's bag of tricks and liked the AnimatingTilePanel.
Silverlight - Are you missing WatermarkedTextBox?
One of controls that I had been using when working with SL 2 Beta 1 was WatermarkedTextBox and when this was taken off from SL 2 Beta 2, I had to rework our application code. It is great to see the control now posted on Kathy's blog here. The discussion seem to incidate that we won't get the updated TextBox with Watermark property in Silverlight 2 RTM.
I downloaded this, but wasn't able to use it as is since the code continues to use System.Windows.Controls.Extended assembly name. I was using other controls like Calendar and DatePicker from the released System.Windows.Controls.Extended assembly with SL2 and this caused conflict when trying to add the assembly for using WatermarkedTextBox. This was however easily fixed by changing the project properties to create the assembly with the name WatermarkedTextBox.dll. I also had to change the namespace in the WatermarkedTextBox.xaml to the following to get the control working.
xmlns:local= "clr-namespace:System.Windows.Controls;assembly=WatermarkedTextBox"
Till the new property is available, this will do !
July 02, 2008
Silverlight - CheckBox issue when in ListBox
Recently for an application I was building on Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2, I had a need to use CheckBox inside the ListBox. Getting the CheckBox into the ListBox item was fairly trivial via the DataTemplate. However the problem started after that.
I could click on the first CheckBox, but when I tried to click on any in the remaining rows, the click won't work. I could easily see the hover effect over the CheckBox so wasn't sure why the click had issues.
Continue reading "Silverlight - CheckBox issue when in ListBox" »
June 25, 2008
Silverlight - Getting Tooltip to work for individual ListBox Items
The other day for a project work that we were doing in Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2, I was trying to get a tooltip to display for each item in the ListBox control. Things seemed to work fine if the content to be displayed in the tooltip was pretty much static or not dependant on individual items. I mean, I had a need that the tooltip should display different text per item, essentially data bind to some value for each item.
Does this makes sense? I guess it does to me, but you may be wondering about what exactly am I trying to achieve? Let me explain that with sample code. Below is the trivialized version of the code I was working on. There is a list of employees, who I am displaying in a ListBox.
Continue reading "Silverlight - Getting Tooltip to work for individual ListBox Items" »
June 24, 2008
Silverlight - missed compiler error
Recently during my attempts to program with Silverlight landed me with a runtime exception (System.Windows.Markup.XamlParseException) with error as AG_E_PARSER_BAD_PROPERTY_VALUE. Fortunately, the error also provided line and column number in XAML. However when I looked at the XAML, it looked well formed and there wasn't any compilation error as well.
It was then that i realized that the compiler had actually missed catching the fact that I had defined click event handler for a Button in XAML, but not written it in the code behind. Having worked with WPF, I know that such errors are caught at compile time. I am surprised why Silverlight compiler missed this.
June 12, 2008
Migrating Comparis Silverlight Challenge App to Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2
With the Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 now available, I finally decided to take the plunge. So far, I had been focusing on WPF, but knowing that Silverlight is the next big wave for RIA development, I could not stay away longer.
A few fellow colleagues have been working with Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 and I heard from them that Beta 2 has been a bit of a challenge considering the various breaking changes from Beta 1 to Beta 2. Fortunately these were mostly functional/API issues with Silverlight controls and not like the interesting issue faced by my colleague Kishore with his attempt to work with .net 3.5 SP1 beta. Since I was new, I started with the Comparis Silverlight Challenge Application and the HOL created by Swiss MSDN Team.
Continue reading "Migrating Comparis Silverlight Challenge App to Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2" »
June 09, 2008
'Devigners' ?... or more complete software developers ?
Continue reading "'Devigners' ?... or more complete software developers ?" »
Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2
If you have been following Silverlight, you would already be aware that Microsoft released Beta 2 of Silverlight 2.0 last weekend. Check out more details on Scott's blog. The release also includes release of updated extension for VS 2008, Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview and DeepZoom composer. Also check out here for feature listing.
However moving from Beta 1 to 2 may not be a smooth sailing as there are many breaking changes. Read about them here. The list has been further updated and available here.
May 13, 2008
WPF Label or TextBlock
Pre WPF days just had a Label control and hence there wasn't really a choice. Now in WPF you have Label and a new TextBlock control. I have been wondering on usually which one to use in the application when i hit upon this interesting comparison between the two by Josh. There is one additional difference mentioned in comments down below on that blog that talk about auto inversion of colors for TextBlock if it is part of say a ListItem. However to me it looked more like setting the Foreground to white, since when i tried with styling the item selection color to something else, the TextBlock still showed white color.
Honestly I am now left more confused. TextBlock is light weight and hence good from app performance perspective, but Label gives the access key functionality, something that people prefer to have in their applications. It will be really good to have this functionality extended to TextBlock.
What is it that you use in your applications and why? Comments welcome.
April 28, 2008
WPF ObjectDataProvider vs Direct Object Use
When using object instances in XAML, there are two ways to use them. One is to directly create them as resources, assign and key and use where ever required and other is to embed them inside of ObjectDataProvider and then use.
I have worked with both ways and was curious to know the differences between the two and benefit of using one approach over another. I can across this old blog by Beatriz that explain this very well. Along same lines, here is some discussion on XmlDataProvider as well.
April 17, 2008
WPF makes Designers and Developers friends again
I have been playing around with WPF for a while and have been blogging about some of the technical aspects on it. However today I will like to touch upon another important aspect of WPF and that is designer-developer connect.
Having worked on Windows Programming using C++, MFC etc for a decade and working with the various controls, it is a real pleasure to see the capabilities now available to WPF developers. It is true to a large extent that with WPF and XAML and the tools like Expression Blend, designers and developers can work lot more closely than ever before. The working closely is more towards the ability for designers to style the UI for the WPF application and the developers to write the code for it.
Continue reading "WPF makes Designers and Developers friends again" »
April 10, 2008
WPF - Passing string to ConverterParameter
There are enough online sources that talk about how to buid and use custom Converters in WPF and also how to pass parameters to these converters. However for some reason, all these examples tend to either use a single integer or a single word string. So recently when I had a need for passing a sentence as parameter, I was confused.
Fortunately the simple trick of using single quotes inside of double quotes to provide strings worked in this case as well. Following are two ways you can pass a string that has multiple words to a converter.
Continue reading "WPF - Passing string to ConverterParameter" »
April 04, 2008
WPF - Binding to Image Control
Overtime, I have used different approaches to binding pictures to Image control in a WPF application. I have seen various questions on the WPF forum as well on this topic. The information is all available out there, but scattered. Hence, I decided to create a sample application to demostrate the various scenarios that can exist when you need to use the Image control to display pictures.
March 26, 2008
WPF - Updating XmlDataProvider when source XML changes
Some days back i had answered a question on the WPF Forum on how to ensure that when the base XML file changes, the XmlDataProvider is udpated and hence the bound control on the UI.
The key is to set a watch on the particular XML file for changes and then update the provider appropriately. See details here. This solution works fine, but I didn't particularly like my initial code that I wrote since the FileSystemWatcher was set externally. It would be better if this could be self contained within the XmlDataProvider itself.
Continue reading "WPF - Updating XmlDataProvider when source XML changes" »
March 18, 2008
Expression Blend issue with WPF Data binding debugging
Some days back I had pointed to the blog by Beatriz on how to debug WPF data binding errors. I have been using the PresentationTraceSources.TraceLevel feature (available with .NET 3.5) since then and have found it very easy to use and very effective in resolving my data binding errors.
However recently when I opened a XAML, which had this debugging feature enabled, in Expression Blend 2.5 March Preview, I got an error. The XAML won't open in designer and showed "Invalid XAML" with details as 'The member "TraceLevel" is not recognized or is not accessible'.
Continue reading "Expression Blend issue with WPF Data binding debugging" »
March 12, 2008
WPF TextBox Memory Issue
Some days back, I had blogged about this issue and suggested how to set global style to counter this. However it turns out that with that you may run into 'Cannot use UndoService while it is disabled' related error. To address that, you will need to modify the style using a DataTrigger as below.
<Style TargetType="{x:Type TextBox}">
<Style.Triggers>
<DataTrigger Binding="{Binding Path=IsLoaded, RelativeSource={RelativeSource Self}}" Value="True">
<Setter Property="UndoLimit" Value="0" />
</DataTrigger>
</Style.Triggers>
</Style>
MS has accepted the behavior behind this as a bug. Read more discussion on this here.
March 10, 2008
WPF XmlDataProvider, Working with External XML Files
Recently on the WPF Forum I came across an interesting problem about use of XmlDataProvider in XAML and its ability to load external XML files. It took a bit of a struggle, but eventually I did manage to get it working. Here I will try and explain it in some detail so that others can also benefit.
We all know that one can easily bind to inline XML in XAML or can load that from external file. If working with inline XML, you usually use XData to specify the XML file content.
Continue reading "WPF XmlDataProvider, Working with External XML Files" »
March 06, 2008
Expression Blend 2.5 still has some issues with Globalization
Last week I had blogged about an issue with Expression Blend Dec 2007 Preview when working with Globalization and Localization. Yesterday at MIX 2008 Microsoft has launched Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview along with SilverLight 2.0 Beta. For a list of all the products announced during MIX check here.
With the new version of Expression Blend available, I went ahead and upgraded my machine with it and decided to give it a shot for the Globalization issue I had faced earlier.
Continue reading "Expression Blend 2.5 still has some issues with Globalization" »
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