All posts by Jeremy

Thinking in WPF: attached properties

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Today, I decided to start a series that I’m calling “Thinking in WPF”. As you already know, I do NOT consider myself as a WPF specialist, so those blog posts don’t aim at giving a perfect knowledge of the “best” (if there are any) ways of thinking in WPF. I’d just like to share what I’m experiencing 🙂

In my previous post, I started to write about things that I think makes WPF different. In the current project I’m working on at work, I had a good example of a new way of thinking with WPF. Todays article deals with a new WPF concept called Attached properties.

Continue reading Thinking in WPF: attached properties →

Introducing the ContentSlider control

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In my very first article, I wrote an article about an implementation of a solution allowing to use transition (using a sliding effect) between views in a WPF application.

As a reminder, here when I talk about “views” I mean a screen of the application. One of this screen could be used as a login screen, the other one to setup parameters, etc.

In this article, I introduce a CustomControl that I build in order to re-use the implementation I described in an easy way. Basically, using this control, you can write something like:

All the specific stuff related to the transition (the animation, the use of a VisualBrush…) is handled INSIDE the control so that it is completely transparent to use.

From C# code point of view, you’ll need to use 3 functions:

  • PrepareSlide()
  • SlideToLeft()
  • SlideToRight()

The first one (PrepareSlide) must be called right before changing the content of the view. It will create a “snapshot” of the view so that it will become possible to animate it.

The next two one should be called to slide the content to the left (or to the right).

I hope you’ll enjoy it. Here is a solution containing the control with example.

Read on a forum: only problems with WPF…

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A couple of days ago, I found a post on a WPF forum with the title “Only problems with WPF…”, and it basically looks like the following:

“When I installed VS.net express 2008, I was happy because I thought that with WPF I’ll be able to build nice UI. Unfortunately, I have the felling this is more like a source of problems… I spent several hours to fill a ListView with some data and the result is dirtier than with WinForms. The designer in VS.net sucks and  many controls are missing. It was so simple before…”

I wanted to give my point of view about that kind of reasoning because a couple of months ago, I think I had more or less the same… So, what makes WPF so different ? Or why I cannot just use my WinForms background and start to build wonderfull apps ?

I think that WPF is more than just a new framework or new classes. It is more than that because when you work with WPF, you have to change the way you think and design your apps.

  • You have to change the way your work with controls because you can apply new Style and Template to them so that you can completely change the way they look
  • You have to change the way you design your apps because of DataBinding and Commands
  • You have to… forget almost every things you already know, and be ready to learn again !

If I can give an advice, I would suggest to read a good WPF book. A couple of weeks ago, I finished to read WPF unleashed, by Adam Nathan [1. available at amazon.com], and I really think that having this kind of the book is the right way start working with WPF. A lot of cool website are also full of interesting resources, CodeProject is maybe the one that I like the most.

To conlude, I would like to give a quick example [2. I was inspired by CT06: Applications = Designers + Developpers at Mix08 available here].

Imagine you’d like to build an application to browse a catalog of products. For each product, you need to see the name of the product, its designer, a description and an image. You also would like to have navigation build around the use of 2 arrows to browse products:

Building a WPF application

How could you achieve this ? You might think about several ways to do it. The point is that you can do this by only using a ListBox and changing its style ! Isn’t amazing ? Go ahead and check the full video at http://sessions.visitmix.com/.