Tag Archives: .Net

Review of 2009 blog posts

General, , , , , ,

In the past year, I’ve posted more than 30 articles on my blog. Here is a summary of those posts (link in bold are those which got the most traffic during the year). Obviously, MVVM was a very hot topic during 2009 🙂

January

February

March

April

May

July

August

September

October

November

Discover and compare existing MVVM frameworks !

How to measure rendering time in a WPF application ?

WPF, , ,

Last week, a colleague of mine asked me an interesting question: “I’m filling a control with content and I’d like to measure the time needed to render my control. How can I do that ?”

The first approach is to measure the elapsed time needed to instantiate and populate the control from C# code. We can use the StopWatch class to have a precise and easy to use measuring tool. 

Stopwatch sw = new Stopwatch();
sw.Start();

for (int i = 0; i < 5000; i++)
{
  // here is the operation that fills the control
  this.canvas.Children.Add(new Rectangle());
}

sw.Stop();
MessageBox.Show("Took " + sw.ElapsedMilliseconds + " ms");

However this approach will not give good results because we're not taking into account the time needed to render elements in the visual tree. This is because elements are not rendered when you call the Add methods (for example in a Canvas) but when the visual tree is fully loaded.

A much better approach is to use the Dispatcher and request it to process an action at a priority right bellow the Render priority which is the Loaded priority:

dispatcherpriority

Using this trick, we ensure that all rendering actions have been completed. We can use the following code to do that:

Stopwatch sw = new Stopwatch();
sw.Start();

for (int i = 0; i < 5000; i++)
{
  // here is the operation that fills the control
  this.canvas.Children.Add(new Rectangle());
}

this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(
  DispatcherPriority.Loaded,
  new Action(() =>
  {
    sw.Stop();
    MessageBox.Show("Took " + sw.ElapsedMilliseconds + " ms");
  }));

Hope this helps !

WPF internals part 1 : what are the core WPF classes ?

.Net, WPF,

In this first article, I’d like to make a tour of the core WPF classes and how they are related.

Knowing the organization of WPF classes is important when we create a new control because we have to determine which base class we’re going to use. It is also interesting to know how the framework has been designed. That’s the goal of this first article.

Here is an image of the core WPF classes and how they are related (click for larger resolution):

The diagram is voluntary simple above the Control classes because that will be targeted by another article.

The top level class DispatcherObject:

  • represents an object that is associated with a Dispatcher
  • can be accessed from a thread other than the thread the DispatcherObject was created on, using Invoke or BeginInvoke calls
  • can enforce thread safety by calling VerifyAccess
  • cannot be independently instantiated; that is, all constructors are protected

From the DispatcherObject class, we have 4 new classes (one more time, this is a partial view of what really is in the framework):

The DependencyObject class:

  • contains the mechanism to deal with Dependency Properties through a set of methods such as ClearValue, SetValue and GetValue
  • is inherited by 3 new classes
    • TriggerBase, for specifying a conditional value within a Style object. Inherited by DataTrigger, EventTrigger…
    • Freezable, for object that has a modifiable state and a read-only (frozen) state. Classes that derive from Freezable provide detailed change notification, can be made immutable, and can clone themselves
    • and the Visual class,

The Visual class:

  • provides rendering support in WPF, which includes hit testing, coordinate transformation, and bounding box calculations
  • is the first class supporting the VisualParent property that helps setting up the visual tree
  • support methods for adding, removing and getting visual child (through the IAddChild interface)
  • has an VisualEffect property of type Effect (from Animatable / Freezable)
  • is inherited by the UIElement class,

The UIElement class:

  • can render as a child element
  • contains logic that is used to size and position possible child elements of a UIElement (when interpreted by a layout system)
  • can respond to user input (including control of where input is getting sent to via their handling of event routing, or routing of commands)
  • can raise routed events that travel a route through the logical element tree
  • supports some aspects of the animation system
  • is enhanced by the FrameworkElement class,

The FrameworkElement class extends the UIElement class by adding the following functionalities:

  • layout system definition using the ArrangeOverride method
  • logical tree with the Parent property
  • object lifetime events such as Initialized, Loaded, Unloaded
  • support for databinding (DataContext property) and resources management (Resources property)
  • support styles (Style property)
  • does not handle the Template feature implemented in the Control class

Several classes inherit the FrameworkElement class:

The Control class:

  • is the base class for WPF controls that use a ControlTemplate to define their appearance (through the Template property)
  • defines a set of UI properties (that can be exploited by ControlTemplates): Background, BorderBrush, BorderThickness, FontFamily, FontSize, FontStrech, FontStyle, FontWeight, Foreground and Padding
  • support mouse double clicks event using MouseDoubleClick and PreviewMouseDoubleClick

In order to show where most of the WPF controls are (but that will be the object of another article), I also added ContentControl, ItemsControl, UserControl and Window class to the diagram.