In WPF & Silverlight, a Storyboard is a collection of animations running in parallel. Not everyone likes the name “Storyboard” though. The idea behind the name was that that list of timelines running in parallel are like a list of plot...

I’ve never found TreeView to be terribly confusing by itself. But usually I want to data bind a TreeView to a collection with some hierarchy, which leads me to HierarchicalDataTemplate, which didn’t always just write itself for me. If you look at it in...

When we create new classes and members we spend a lot of time and effort to make them as usable, understandable, and discoverable as possible. We follow the .Net Design Guidelines in general, and in particular we constantly look at how this new class...

Here’s the scenario … You have a Customers collection and an Orders collection. In the Orders collection, an Order has a CustomerID property; this is the key to an item in the Customers collection. Your goal is a ComboBox that updates the CustomerID property...

ICommand is a simple interface with three members – Execute, CanExecute, and CanExecuteChanged (more on those here ). You can write your own implementations of that interface, one for each command, but that gets a bit heavyweight. So there are several...

(This has been updated with some information about the origin of a routed command’s route, and of focus scopes.) ICommand in WPF is a pretty simple thing at its core. But it gets more interesting and complicated as you build up functionality on...

I don’t remember what got me thinking about it, but somewhere along the line I wanted a master/detail view with a navigation bar. E.g., when you change selection in the master view, you can navigate back to the previous selection. Here’s an example...

Property triggers today only check for equality. We’d like to add support for other comparison operators, but that hasn’t happened yet. But I needed them for a project, and wrote a workaround for it. It’s a bit hacky in a couple of places, but if you...

I was creating a view of an object that had a bunch of boolean properties, but I wanted to keep the visual representation small. So I created a look for a compact CheckBox that I liked enough to post. As an example scenario, say I’m visualizing a the...

StringFormat is a new property in .Net 3.5 SP1, which is currently in Beta. See Scott’s blog for more info on the beta. When you bind data into a property on an element, it’s automatically type converted for you. For example, this markup: ...

This post is about the “logical tree” in WPF, and how it differs from the visual tree. For the most part you don’t need to understand this. But if you want to understand some of the nit-like details of property inheritance, {DynamicResource} references...

Like a lot of people, I’ve developed software professionally for a lot of different environments: PC systems and embedded systems; high- and low-level languages; kernel mode, user mode, real mode, and protected mode; system services; domain controllers;...

It's easy to use Linq queries to create objects, and to use {Binding}s to bind properties of those objects into your view. If you're doing this for an application that will run as an Xbap ("WPF Browser Application") or as a Silverlight app, just note...

Rob , Nikhil & I were talking today about the early days of Xaml when you could create linear gradient brushes as an attribute value. E.g. (borrowing from Rob’s post on this subject) instead of creating a LinearGradientBrush for the fill of a rectangle...

Here's an example of a way to add context-sensitive help to your application. The main idea is to simply use the built-in ApplicationCommands.Help command. This command is already tied to the F1 key, and so executes when you hit F1, and tells your...

There are several elements in Wpf that have a "Stretch" property. The basic idea of these properties is to allow you to specify how an element adapts itself to a layout container, such as a Grid. For example, if you have a 100x200 pixel image, and it...

We often use Xaml to instantiate and initialize objects. For example, given “<Foo Bar=’1’/>”, a Xaml loader creates a Foo object, and sets the Bar property to 1. That works when the Bar property is settable, but what can you do if it isn’t? ...

Here’s a couple of handy ProgressBar tricks … The first trick is to use a negative Minimum value, so that as soon as a ProgressBar starts, you give the user the visual feel that the progress has already begun. This is especially useful if, in your...

If you’re really into Xml conformance, and you’ve really wondered how Xaml uses Xml namespaces, read on; I can cover the most relevant details in 1160 words or less … Namespaces on tags (I’m using the term “tag” here instead of the more correct term ...

This post has a couple of suggestions on ways to accomplish expandos in Xaml. F irst some background … On an HTML page you can define your own new “expando” properties on the fly, such as in this example: < HTML > < BODY onload...

If you’ve look at much WPF Xaml you’ve probably seen bindings like this: < TextBlock Text = " {Binding Name " /> … which binds the Text property of the TextBlock to the Name property of some data object. The question that begets...

Here’s a technique you can follow to use property triggers in a template on non-element type objects. First, though, some background on what that means … Take this example of a Button with a custom template which is simply a rectangle: <...

There are multiple ways to clone objects, and multiple definitions of what “clone” should even mean. The main issue is usually about cloning “deep” vs. “shallow”. For example, if you have a Customer object that points to an Address object, and you...

I’ve talked to a few people recently about parameterized templates, and so I wanted to write some of it down. Here’s the scenario … I want to create an application that has a main window with several buttons on it. Clicking one of the buttons navigates...

How to set the mouse cursor in one easy step: set the Cursor property. For example, this markup: < Button Cursor = " Help " > Help </ Button > … sets the cursor to be the “ Help ” cursor, when the mouse is over the button. ...