Last week we published an article by VB MVP Alessandro Del Sole on how to utilize a cool Windows 7 Task Bar feature from WPF. Well this week we published another one on Jump Lists and Ale has promised to deliver even more! So yesterday we added a dedicated page to the Visual Basic Developer Center that...

This week we published an article by VB MVP Alessandro Del Sole on how to utilize a cool Windows 7 Task Bar feature from WPF. You can use WPF 4 to specify thumbnail buttons that appear for your app when people hover over it in the Windows 7 Taskbar. Ale also shows the basics of using the commanding pattern...

Last post I showed how to migrate our Northwind Outlook client to .NET 4 and Office 2010 . This Outlook Add-in displays order history information in an adjoining form region so sales associates can see that data immediately when communicating with customers. When we originally built this with Visual...

Early this year we built a business application for order management for Northwind Traders on the Office and SharePoint platform using Visual Studio 2008 and Office & SharePoint 2007. If you missed them: Architecture of the Northwind Office Business Application OBA Part 1 - Exposing Line...

I was cleaning up my desk today and in the piles of mail and gobs of paper I found the SDN Magazine “Women in Technology” issue 101 that featured an article I wrote that was released in print back in May. Well, I just noticed today that near the end of June they made most of the articles available online...

Last post I talked about how to get WPF data binding to work with master-detail entity collections. I had a couple readers ask me how they could filter the child collection instead of bringing them all down so in this post I’d like to show how you could do that. It’s actually pretty easy. Customer (Master...

Today I thought I would talk about a really common scenario in data applications, creating a master-details (one-to-many) data entry form. I’ve written about WPF data binding and Entity Framework a lot in the past: Posts: Master-Details with Entity Framework Explicit Load Loading Data and...

I’ve blogged before about implementing validation on LINQ to SQL classes as well as how to customize the display of error messages in WPF . In this post I want to show how you can use these same techniques to validate entities coming from the Entity Framework (EF). Like LINQ to SQL classes, Entity Framework...

The ObservableCollection is a special WPF collection that provides proper notifications to the UI when items are added, removed, or the list is refreshed because it implements INotifyCollectionChanged . It’s common to use this collection (or inherit from it) to contain your business objects you want...

Last week I wrote about how to data bind WPF lookup comboboxes to entities returned from the Entity Framework. I described that the key to this type of binding is setting the SelectedItem to the object reference itself on the navigation property instead of setting SelectedValue and SelectedValuePath...

It’s extremely common to have to hook up lookup tables on your data entry forms in order to populate foreign keys in a database. I’ve talked about how to do this in Winforms and WPF with Datasets and LINQ to SQL before: How Do I: Create a Lookup Combobox in WPF? How Do I: Create a Master-Detail Data...

In my last few app building posts we've been building a simple Office Business Application (OBA) for the new Northwind Traders. If you missed them: OBA Part 1 - Exposing Line-of-Business Data OBA Part 2 - Building and Outlook Client against LOB Data OBA Part 3 - Storing and Reading Data in Word Documents...

In the last couple posts we've been talking about an Office Business Application (OBA) architecture for the new Northwind Traders and how to expose line-of-business (LOB) data , in our case the Northwind SQL database, using ADO.NET Data Services . Today we're going to talk about how to build an Outlook...

Last few posts I've been building a WPF client against ADO.NET Data Services, if you missed them: Using ADO.NET Data Services ADO.NET Data Services - Building a WPF Client ADO.NET Data Services - Enforcing FK Associations and a Fix for Deleting Entities Today I want to show you how we...

In my last post I introduced ADO.NET Data Services and how you can easily expose your data model via RESTful services that support the basic CRUD (Create,Retrieve,Update,Delete) operations. Basic CRUD database operations map well to the familiar HTTP verbs POST, GET, MERGE, DELETE and the framework takes...

One of the basic things that we need to do as business application developers is to make sure that data being displayed to a user makes sense to them and that they know what type of data something is when they are making edits. In every business application I've written the data entry forms needed to...

When designing WPF Windows with data (or as I usually refer to them WPF "Forms") we have many options on how we want to load the data and bind our controls. Depending on where the data is coming from and how it's being used there are a lot of possibilities. DataContext "Direct" Suppose...

Check out the latest news on the VB Dev Center . I'm finally headlining myself ;-) I'm in the October issue of MSDN Magazine . I've been managing the content for the Basic Instincts column for a little over a year now where we rotate writers from the VB Team. This month is my birthday month so I decided...

In my last post on WPF I showed how you could use a Winforms DataGridView on a WPF form in order to edit data in a tabular style. Today I'll show you how you can customize the WPF ListView in order to edit data without having to use any Winforms controls at all. WPF gives us the ultimate flexibility...

A pretty common requirement of any business application is to be able to edit data in a "spreadsheet" or tabular style. Usually we use some sort of data grid to do this. When building WPF applications in Visual Studio 2008 you'll notice right away that there is no such control available in the toolbox...

One of the things I was really missing from WPF when I started to dig into data binding was feature consistency between the BindingListCollectionView and the Winforms BindingSource I had grown to love. The BindingListCollectionView provides the navigation, currency, filtering and sorting on the bound...

As you can probably tell from my last couple posts I've been working with WPF in different data scenarios. Yesterday I was playing with data validation in WPF and .NET 3.5 which is pretty slick. In this article I'll walk through how to hook up validation in your data objects using the IDataErrorInfo...

In my last post on this subject I explored creating WPF UI's dynamically using XML literals. The one part that bugged me a bit was that even though the UI was dynamic, we were using a fixed object model of our customer (using LINQ to SQL classes). I wanted to augment this code a bit more so that we could...

Lately I've been getting my hands deep into WPF with my line-of-business (LOB)/data-based application mind set. I'm taking a different approach to the technology resisting the urge to put on my amateur-designer hat and instead purely focus on data, data-binding, formatting controls, and some basic layout...