Articles filed in category 'WPF'

Rick examines what is—and isn’t—coming in .NET Core Runtime. You’ll get to put this knowledge to good use as you build a small app, too.

Software vendors and conferences would tell you that the desktop is dead, but if you’re a working consultant, you know that’s not true. Mike dives into a great tool using WinForms to show you what you’ve been missing.

Paul begins a new series of articles on how to create a WPF business application. This first one teaches how to use a message broker to eliminate strong coupling between classes, how to display status and information to the user while resources are loading, and how to load user controls onto a single window while aggregating controls and building a large screen.

In the second installment of his new series, Paul explores sending a message from a View Model class to the main window, setting up a timer, and creating a log in screen.

In the third installment of his WPF series, Paul shows you how to get feedback using an Entity Framework entity class. He also shows you how to start expanding user activities, like adding, editing, or deleting screens.

Rick Strahl discusses Windows Vista for developers.

As is often the case, applications are not typically designed with accessibility in mind.Usually, applications are designed to satisfy business requirements. If those business requirements do not include accessibility, more likely than not, the application as a whole will be inaccessible to important segments of users. There are, however, steps you can take to mitigate this common lack of foresight in requirements analysis.

At Mix 2007 in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced Silverlight (formerly known as WPF/E) to much fanfare. Silverlight is very intriguing in concept, as it further travels the path previously laid out by WPF (Silverlight’s big brother), and it aims to bring the worlds of Windows and Web development, as well as the worlds of software development and graphical design, much closer together. As more and more details emerge (and the first released version is now available), it beco...mes clear that Silverlight is not just an intriguing concept, but it is for real! Markus discusses Silverlight concepts in this article.See More

Many people will not be able to upgrade to Windows 8 right away for various reasons. However, there is nothing to stop you from designing your WPF applications to have a similar look and feel.

In part 1 of this article, you learned how to create a Windows 8 look and feel for your WPF applications. You were shown a high-level overview of the various components that made up the shell for navigating. In part 2 of this article you will learn to create a WPF Button user control, a Message Box you can style, and a simple Message Broker System. All of these components are used to create the “Windows 8 Style” WPF shell you learned about in part 1.

In Part 1 of this article you learned how to create a Windows 8 look and feel for your WPF applications. In Part 2 of this article you learned to create a few of the user controls that went into making the shell application. In this final article in this series, you will learn how to create the last few user controls that I used to create the Windows 8 Shell application. In this article, you will learn to put together a WPF Image button, an Image button with text and fin...ally the main Tiles used for the primary navigation system.See More

By now you should have heard of several new acronyms that are usually associated with Windows Vista (codenamed Longhorn).

There’s no longer a simple answer to what sort of device your page will be viewed upon. Walt examines the options and shows you how to make sure that yours will look great on anything, old or new.

By providing the history of asynchronous and await patterns, Bill examines the benefits of using these techniques in developing new apps and when it comes to the maintenance or revision of legacy code.

Ink is a first-class citizen in the next generation of Microsoft® Windows® user interfaces.Microsoft built ink functionality into all versions of the Microsoft Windows Vista™ operating system, and the new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) makes it easy to ink-enable your applications. Even using ink over moving video is easy in WPF!

CoDe Focus Mobile Editorial by Markus Egger

Rick Strahl discusses building rich internet applications

Markus Egger discusses tools used to create WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation, formerly "Avalon") interfaces, in particular, WinFX Extensions for Visual Studio as well as the Microsoft Expression product line.

WPF is finally gaining momentum, and so is Silverlight.Users are starting to take a serious look at Silverlight as an option for rich applications; some of them even have scenarios where targeting both platforms make sense. The Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight Applications has received improvements that help developers building either WPF, Silverlight, or both types of composite applications.

When you build complex UI applications, it is all too easy to end up with a messy, tightly coupled, interwoven mess that is difficult to develop and maintain; and impossible to test.Too avoid that, you need to employ good design patterns in your UI layer that help you keep things loosely-coupled and testable. Composite Application Guidance for WPF is a set of libraries, documentation, and sample code from Microsoft patterns & practices that helps you to build clean, main...tainable applications. In this article, I’ll show you what this set of guidance provides and how to use it to build your WPF applications.See More

With WPF and Silverlight, Microsoft provides both Windows and Web developers with powerful technologies to create rich, professional, and exciting user experiences.However, in general, developers aren’t graphical designers, leaving most developers wondering how to cope with this new world of designed interfaces and polished user experiences. But fear not! With Expression Blend, Microsoft provides a great tool to create such UIs, and even developers with no graphical tale...nts whatsoever can learn a few techniques that allow for better looking applications.See More

WPF excels at creating great looking applications.

Silverlight Unleashed - Embedding the Silverlight Control Manually - Letting Silverlight.js Handle the Dirty Work - Understanding Your Hosting Options - Interacting with the Silverlight Control Programmatically

In a prior installment of this series of articles about CODE Framework (“CODE Framework: Writing MVVM/MVC WPF Applications”, Jan/Feb 2012), I discussed how to use the WPF features of CODE Framework to create rich client applications in a highly productive and structured fashion reminiscent of creating ASP.NET MVC applications, although with WPF MVVM concepts applied. In this article, I will dive deeper into the subject and discuss the unique benefits of the CODE Framewor...k WPF components which enable developers to create the part of the UI that is actually visible in a highly productive and reusable manner.See More

In the last issue of CODE Magazine, we took a look at CODE Framework’s WPF features. This time, we are going to look at a completely different area of the framework: Creating business logic and middle tiers as SOA services. SOA is the cornerstone of many modern applications, creating systems that are more maintainable, flexible, and suitable for a wide range of scenarios, ranging from Windows to Web and Mobile scenarios using a wide variety of technologies, and outperfor...ming conventional multi-tiered applications in a range of metrics. Using CODE Framework, it also becomes easy and extremely productive to build SOA layers.See More

The CODE Framework WPF features (based on MVVM and MVC concepts) have become very popular amongst .NET developers, thanks to ease of development paired with a high degree of freedom, control and reuse. Another CODE Framework module takes these concepts and extends them into the domain of documents and printing. Many applications use third-party reporting products to create print and report output, and those products certainly have a good reason for existence and aren’t e...ntirely replaced by the CODE Framework Document features. However, the CODE Framework Document features can replace some functionality that would otherwise be handled by reporting packages, and in addition, the CODE Framework Document features add a significant number of new features including the ability to create more naturally flowing documents and printouts and use those not just for print, but also use them as interactive user interfaces.See More

If you have been following this series of CODE Framework articles, you are already aware that CODE Framework provides the ability to use, create, and customize awesome-looking WPF application themes that also make apps maintainable and easy to build. But not everyone wants to create brand new Themes or customize existing ones. Instead, why not just use one of the great themes that ship in the box?

The CODE Framework is an open-source application framework by the makers of CODE Magazine. It is entirely free of charge. It covers a wide range of features that can be applied altogether or individually in an À la carte fashion. All of these features revolve around a single concept: Building advanced business applications in a productive and maintainable fashion while maintaining great application architecture. In this article, we are focusing on a subset of the CODE Fr...amework, specifically the components used to build WPF applications using the MVVM and MVC patterns.See More

Those helpful buttons for minimize, maximize, and close functions need to be added to your WPF pages if you don’t want to crowd your user’s screen. Paul shows you how.

It’s becoming less and less common to show raw data directly to the user.At the very least, portions of your data may require reformatting to make it more readable for your users. But applying a simple format, say showing a numeric value as a percentage, only goes so far. WPF offers an impressive data transformation tool called Data Templates that can radically change the visualization applied to business data.

All applications are dependent on data in some form and most developers find themselves writing reams of data access code.Microsoft has been building data binding frameworks for years. Each one promises to solve our data binding woes forever. We're still waiting for the perfect one. Is WPF data binding the one we've been waiting for?

All applications are dependent on data in some form and most developers find themselves writing reams of data access code.Microsoft has been building databinding frameworks for years. Each one promises to solve our databinding woes forever. We’re still waiting for the perfect one.In the Nov/Dec 2008 issue of CoDe Magazine you were exposed to programmatically controlling data binding mechanisms of WPF. Along with a programmatic interface, WPF also provides a declarative d...atabining interface. This second article will introduce you to using the declarative data binding mechanisms contained in WPF.See More

You know you should be moving code out from behind your forms, windows and web pages and into stand-alone classes. Everyone preaches that this is what to do, everyone shows you examples of ViewModel classes, but no one really shows you a real-world example of how to get rid of the code behind.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Services can be hosted with Internet Information Services (IIS); with the new Windows Activation Service (WAS) installed with IIS 7.0; or with any managed application process including console, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), or managed Windows service applications.Selecting the right hosting environment for your services is a choice driven largely by deployment requirements related to transport protocol and operating platform.

The INotifyPropertyChanged interface, while easy to implement, is hard to consume.Registering for notification events requires extra bookkeeping code that obfuscates business logic. Update Controls is an open source library that replaces event-based data binding with automatic discovery and updating. Powerful yet difficult patterns become simple.

Tablet PC and Mobile PC development is very popular today, and it will get more popular and important in the future.For Mobile PC developers, there are significant changes coming in the near future, some in the Windows XP timeframe, others in Windows Vista. This article provides an overview over what’s on the drawing board or already available in technology preview builds.

Ten years after the release of the .NET Framework, Microsoft is stirring the pot again with a new development platform that set’s to focus your talents on what everyone is betting is the next big thing, mobile devices; specifically in this case, tablets. The Windows Runtime, or WinRT, is the foundation for the development of applications designed to target Windows 8-driven touch-enabled devices, but what does that mean for .NET developers and their existing skill sets?

You’re probably already using Markdown for HTML text entry and formatting your README.md files. But Markdown is good for so much more—Rick shows you parsing, stable content in a website, embedding converted HTML into a Razor output, and more.

Walt continues his series of articles on Xamarin, this time, exploring the nature of pages. You’ll learn what a page is, how to navigate among them, how to create sub-pages, and strategies for loading data onto pages.

Struggling to grasp the concepts of Model-View-View-Model? Keep it simple!

July/August2010 Post Mortem by Markus Egger

The next version of Silverlight should be available by the time you read this article. The Silverlight team has followed a fast pace during the last few years, producing four versions of their framework in only thirty months. Each new version of Silverlight has been full of surprises and useful features. Version 5 is no different. Let’s look as some of the best features available in SL 5

Most programmers have a hard time making applications that look interesting and fun. We are great at creating functionality that makes the application do exactly what the user wants, but many applications often look very utilitarian. However, with just a few little XAML tricks, you can make your Silverlight or WPF applications look like an artist had a hand in their creation. In this article I will provide you with a couple of very easy XAML tips that you can use right a...way to spice up the images in your Silverlight and WPF applications. See More

Sometimes it happens that a new version of an operating system introduces a new type of application completely incompatible with older versions of the same system. The last time it happened I think it was with Windows 95. More than 15 years later, Windows 8 comes with support for a completely new segment of applications named Windows Store apps.

Microsoft seemed to have put XAML out to pasture for a while, but Billy shows us how it’s back, and why even Microsoft is touting its praises.

Markus Egger discusses the current State of WPF and Silverlight and the overall importance and acceptance of these technologies.

It’s not enough that creating apps using .NET Core is better than ever before. Now, Olia shows us how with .NET Core 3, upgrading existing apps is easier, too.

When your WPT TreeView needs to go deeper than two levels, you might run into a snag. Paul shows us how to use the HierarchicalDataTemplate to get around this problem.

There are a bunch of hot new tools in CODE Framework that you’ll want to explore, including a new theme, new View Actions, List improvements, a Flow Form layout, support for new versions of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework, and enhancements to the View Visualizer.

If you’d like a neat summary of the many interesting and useful changes in CODE Magazine’s free development framework, you’ve come to the right place. Markus talks about themes, input validation, security, and binding, Web API service hosting, calling REST services, and interacting with the community and GitHub.

Markus Egger discusses screen resolutions.

If you have not taken a look at Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) yet, you really should. WPF is a great desktop development platform. Granted, all of the tools are not yet in place, but Microsoft is pouring millions of dollars into developing WPF tools. Microsoft now considers Windows Forms a legacy technology and they won’t update it within Visual Studio. These two reasons alone should be enough to convince you that need to start learning WPF right now.While WPF of...fers a new set of development tools, you’ll see a lot that looks familiar. You still have the typical desktop controls like text boxes, check boxes, radio buttons, etc. You still write the same C# or Visual Basic code. The major difference is how you layout the screens, control the look and feel of the controls, and some of the properties are a little different. This article will give you a good introduction to what WPF is all about without diving too deep.See More

ListBoxes suck. Except that statement is not true anymore. Not in WPF and Silverlight anyway, where ListBoxes have evolved from simplistic controls to true workhorse objects. ListBoxes have been around since the beginning of Windows (and other GUIs) and have served a pervasive yet simple purpose, which can be summed up as “show me a list of labels in a list with a scroll bar.” A premise that has its uses but is not sophisticated enough for advanced data presentation, ...which is why developers often use special controls such as “data grids” or “list views” among others. In WPF and Silverlight, however, ListBoxes are so flexible and powerful that they are the first choice for just about anything. In fact, WPF originally shipped without a data grid control since ListBoxes all but eliminated that need. Developer perception, however, was different and the power of the ListBoxes went largely unnoticed. That is reason enough for me to write an article that displays the ease, flexibility, and power of ListBoxes. See More

The iPhone is one of the most compelling and exciting user interfaces to appear on any consumer electronic device, with many innovations that make it a pleasure to use. How can you deliver a similar experience with your .NET applications?This article demonstrates how you can implement these features in your .NET applications in a step-by-step format as you recreate the iPhone interface using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) technology with both Visual Studio 2008 an...d Microsoft Expression Blend.See More

In the next article of his series on Xamarin, Walt takes a look at the all-important UI and how to make it work best for the development process and the user.

Markus continues his series on anti-patterns with an interesting look at when to take advantage of certain techniques and when to give them a wide berth.

Just when you think a container is simple, your user resizes the screen and mayhem ensues. If you want to know what happened—or prevent it, better yet—read Markus’ piece about the XAML layout engine.

In the second article of the series, Markus talks about keeping your code readable and maintainable by controlling how often and where you reuse objects.

Markus shows us why virtualization gets a bad reputation and how to clean it up.

XAML properties don’t always behave as you think they might. Markus explains how they work and shows you some nifty ways to use these powerful tools.