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Thursday, June 26, 2008 3:23 PM

Tech-Ed 2008 South Africa

The agenda is updated, here are the 2.5 sessions I will be presenting: Building Data Driven Applications using Windows Presentation Foundation 04 Aug 2008, 12:30 - 13:30 Session Room 7 Level: 300 Most rich applications present data, often lots of it. To avoid writing lots of code to support the presentation of that data, you should take full advantage of the data binding capabilities of your presentation platform. This session discusses and demonstrates the data binding capabilities of Windows Presentation...
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Monday, June 23, 2008 9:11 AM

myHealth

I recently had a friend of mine (who is a professional bodybuilder), ask me to write him a simple application with which he can track his training progress? Here is some of the things I learned while writing myHealth INotifyPropertyChanged vs DependencyObject The PropertyGrid I used unfortunately only work with dependency properties (DependencyObject) so I had to choose them! My personal preference would have been the lighter weight INotifyPropertyChanged. Here are the pro's and con's of...
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Friday, June 13, 2008 11:55 AM

Exam 70-502 - WPF Application Development

Finally made some time to go and write the MCTS 70-502 exam ( Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Windows Presentation Foundation Application Development ) today and passed! The exam was tougher than what I expected to be honest! I was a little disappointed when I started. My personal feeling is that the test focused more on deployment (ClickOnce), etc than actual WPF development! The only positive from this exam (IMHO) is the fact that it tests your knowledge of XAML more than just coding! Share this post...
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Monday, June 02, 2008 10:11 AM

My WPF Build Environment

Setting up your WPF build environment can be a tedious exercise. this weekend, I re-formatted my build PC... here is what I installed to get it up and running again: Operating System Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 All my laptop's drivers (Downloaded newest version from web) Run Windows Updated and install all the available updates Development Software Visual Studio 2008 Professional Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview (Build number MUST be 2.1.1113.0 or better) Windows SDK (Also read Installing...
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Thursday, May 22, 2008 9:51 AM

Scrolling Performance in WPF

With the beta release of .NET 3.5 SP1, scrolling received some much needed performance increases! Lets review first what we used to have and how it has now changed: The problem: This is a example of how a ListBoxItem can now look using WPF! Looks very nice... but it is very taxing... A item like this can contain 30+ UI Element! Imagine if I now have a list of 300 items x 30 UI Elements? It quickly escalates! The solution (Pre SP1): So, how do we reduce the amount of UI element to be created? VirtualizingStackPanel...
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Monday, May 05, 2008 9:28 AM

WPF + ADO?

If you have a WinForms background, you are sure to have used ADO.NET! One of the question I get asked is how do I bind to ADO.NET, LINQ, etc... Here is a very basic example of how to bind to ADO.NET objects. Note: I am using the standard AdventureWorks database available from CodePlex. My Window XAML only has a ListBox < ListView x : Name ="listBox" /> Here is my connection string and my SQL query const string connectionString = @"Data Source=rudi-lt\sqlexpress;Initial Catalog...
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Sunday, April 27, 2008 5:16 PM

Podder Skinning Competition

Have you ever heard of Podder , the excellent podcast player created by WPF expert Josh Smith ? Seen the cooooool skin created by Grant Hinkson ? If no... look at this: Here is your opportunity to show off your design skills! Josh is hosting a competition seeing who can create the best skin for his application! Read more about this here ! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!
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Thursday, April 24, 2008 9:58 AM

Pimp my ListView

The ListView in WPF is a very powerfull control! While we wait patiently for the DataGrid to be released... lets see what we can do with a ListView The Basics Before we start pimping the control... lets look at the basics! I created a very simple data object to be displayed in the ListView public class Disciple { public string Name { get ; set ; } public string Surname { get ; set ; } public string Website { get ; set ; } } and I also populate it with some data List < Disciple > Disciples ...
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Tuesday, April 15, 2008 7:56 AM

Why WPF Rocks (Custom Layout Panel Showcase)

Another enhancement in WPF that makes it stand out above the rest is the excellent layout system. In WinForms, a button has a Top and Left property. Now you can move the button around on the form. What if you want to dock the button to the top? Lets add a property Dock! This works... but what if I want to randomly scatter the buttons over the screen? Or if I want to automatically scale the buttons in equal sizes, even if I maximize my window? You can't keep adding properties to accommodate the...
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Thursday, April 10, 2008 10:31 AM

Cool style/themes for controls

If you haven't seen the excellent control skins released by Corrina Barer (A designer on the Silverlight team), have a look here: Bubbly Red Flat Rough (This one is very cool) I converted the rough skin to WPF without any major issues! I will convert the others also and then post the source (Hopefully with permission from Corrina?) If you are in the market to buy some control themes for WPF, here are some: Infragistics Theme Packs Reuxables Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it...
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Monday, April 07, 2008 9:27 AM

Why WPF Rock... (The content model)

For the last week I was back in WinForms land... There is nothing making you appreciate the new stuff in WPF more than living without it for a week!!! Let me start by giving you some background... I had to make a fairly simple data logger for a client... the only problem is that I only had WinForms to use... I constantly found myself wondering why the hell thy don't have a content model!!! So, what is this content model and why should I care? In WinForms you have a button... very simple control...
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Tuesday, March 11, 2008 6:19 AM

WPF Snippets

Snippets is one of the coolest features of VS. To increase productivity using WPF, the following 2 snippets must be in your collection: Dr WPF's Dependency Properties Dr WPF has a excellent collection of snippets to create various dependency properties and attached properties. This is a very complete set including creating DP's with default values, framework property options, property changed events, etc... Available from here IdentityMine's Nerd+Art IdentityMine , creators of blendables...
Posted by rudi | 7 comment(s)
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Tuesday, March 04, 2008 1:44 PM

Review: Blendables Layout Mix

The Blendables team has done it again... Thy released two new packages just as mix is about to start (Talk about perfect timing). I decided to start by reviewing the Blendables Layout Mix package first... As the name suggest, this is a collection of layout panels... RadialCanvas RadialCanvas lays all its items out in a radial pattern. The center point is configurable. < bl : RadialCanvas Center ="0.5,0.5"> </ bl : RadialCanvas > Each item in the panel's angle and radius...
Posted by rudi | 9 comment(s)
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Monday, March 03, 2008 1:27 PM

Control Authoring for dummies

Charles Petzold don't always use nice pictures to illustrate his WPF code (If you missed it look here ) but he sure can explain! Lately I have been practicing create custom controls. When creating custom controls, you are sure to wonder: "from what should I derive?" The two top choices are Control vs FrameworkElement. What is the difference? Well, here is Mr Petzolds take on it: "First, the Control class adds a collection of very handy properties to the FrameworkElement class,...
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Monday, March 03, 2008 8:58 AM

ListBox Selection Color

While updating my Lab49 entry, I wanted to change the selection color of my default ListBox. This sounds like a simple task in WPF, you would think that!!! Here is my problem: I have a list box bound to a collection of stocks. I have a data template that determine how my list box items look! The DataTemplate is very simple, it has a StackPanel with a TextBlock that is bound to the company name! So, what is the problem? The event IsSelected is only defined in ListBoxItem and I am using StackPanel...
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