jfo's coding - All Comments

re: Random tip of the day: adding a shortcut to all desktops in Windows Vista Server 2008

jfoscoding — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 20:36:39 GMT

That I'm not entirely sure of - I would probably look into policies.

re: Random tip of the day: adding a shortcut to all desktops in Windows Vista Server 2008

adrian — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 15:36:30 GMT

but if i want to add a shortcut to all the clients that log on server? what you said helps for every local account

re: High DPI - it's an everyone thing.

Peter Eb. — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 03:24:55 GMT

You need to talk about web pages too, IE and Firefox do different things in high dpi mode.

re: Creating a bug repro viewer in 5 minutes

Xan — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:20:50 GMT

Other options :

- use a text editor with always-on-top functionality (for example notepad++ - this is very useful also for code collage :))

- use a tool like powermenu which can make any window always on top

re: Tip: creating your own snippets

Doug — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:13:10 GMT

Snippets are great.

The Code Snippet Manager on the other hand is confusing and I prefer to just drop my snippet into the correct directory.

eg. [Documents]\[VS Version]\Code Snippets\Visual C#\My Code Snippets

re: OnRender is not as cheap as OnPaint

jfoscoding — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:31:28 GMT

The short answer is that the Microsoft.Windows.Design.Interaction and Microsoft.Windows.Design.Extensibility APIs are now shared by VS and Blend.

The Property Editing API and the Adorner API are now both shared. The Adorner API has been simplified (you can use a AdornerHorizontal/VerticalAlignment + Margin combo if you find that easier than the AdornerPlacementCollection).

If you have some existing VS 2008 (Orcas) designers written against Cider, you will need to rev them for Dev10, as the ModelItem apis had to change to support both WPF and Silverlight.

There are some older documents here for VS 2008

http://blogs.msdn.com/jnak/archive/2007/08/24/cider-extensibility-help-documentation.aspx

I'll work on proper answers for the rest - it will take me a while though as I would like to give you the answer based on a more current release as the answers are less likely to have changed.

re: OnRender is not as cheap as OnPaint

Phil Wright — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:25:18 GMT

In particular how to create a great design time experience for a Silverlight and WPF pair of controls. I have created a control that has a version in both technologies.

1, How do you get a Silverlight/WPF control to be automatically added to the toolbox so they appear as another toolbox tab alongside the standard ones. I want to do this at install time ideally. I read somewhere that VS2010 has a different method of doing this than previous versions.

2, How to provide custom property editors that work in blend and VS2010.

3, How to add a custom adorner for blend and VS2010.

4, How to add extra XAML that is auto generated by the designer when you drop that control on a designer in blend/VS2010.

5, List of best practices for creating custom controls.

I'm sure I can think of more once you run out!

re: OnRender is not as cheap as OnPaint

jfoscoding — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:18:43 GMT

Thanks! Keep the ideas coming - what particular areas do you think you'd need most help with?

re: OnRender is not as cheap as OnPaint

Phil Wright — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:03:42 GMT

Welcome back to the world of blogging.

If you need recommendations on topics to blog I can think of plenty around Silverlight and WPF design time experiences. Such as explaining the common details of Blend3/VS2010 design time experience for control developers.

re: Demystifying WPF/Silverlight layout properties

jfoscoding — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 02:33:19 GMT

Thanks!

DesiredSize is a layout output, yes. I believe it is a side effect of calling Measure(). If you find you're out of date you can call Measure() manually before calling DesiredSize.

I think you may be able to find out if the DesiredSize needs a refresh via the IsMeasureValid flag.

It's best if you're in a situation where you can work with layout within the layouting events.

UpdateLayout() does a lot more work than you probably want it to -- so if you can avoid that it's usually a good idea.