Windows Presentation Foundation User Education

Inspired by watching a number of World Cup matches, I've created XAML drawing images representing the flags of the eight quarterfinalists in World Cup 2006. The images were created using Expression Graphic Designer and exported as DrawingImage resources...

Through talking to people and monitoring both internal and external forums, I have compiled a list of questions people often have when first learning about WPF data binding. If you have any questions, please leave a comment and let me know! What...

Guest post by Joe Castro, WPF product team developer This document covers the design and some implementation details of getting WPF windows wrapped in custom chrome. Currently WPF supports standard windows, with an icon, title-text, and caption buttons...

A cool new feature in the Data area in 3.5 is the support for IDataErrorInfo. Let's take a look at the data validation model in 3.5 by starting with a memory refresher of that in 3.0. We end with a section that discusses how to choose between the different...

Shows how to use the ZIndex attached property to change the z-order of child objects in a Panel-derived class collection....

We posted previously about the development of the WPF chart controls. With the release of the June WPF Toolkit you now have the controls at your fingertips. You can make bar, pie, bubble, scatter and line graphs. Check out this blog post for details!...

This post shows you how to find a named element within a DataTemplate. In Part I , we discussed how to find a named element within a ControlTemplate. That was fairly simple; you’d call Template.FindName on the control that the ControlTemplate has...

I finally got some time to dig through all my customer feedback requests and found a glaring problem! The OpenFileDialog class has basically no content on it and so I set about correcting that. It turned out there was a nice little example already living...

This post covers some tips and tricks that people frequently ask concerning specifying the appearance of a ListBox. Here’s some things that someone, somewhere, might find useful: Specifying the Selection Color If you’ve ever tried the following...

XAML FlowDocuments and HTML have some things in common. But they also have some distinct differences that makes writing a conversion utility tricky. A well written XSLT could potentially process XHTML input and generate FlowDocument content... But this...

The question about how to define and use shared resources in a custom library has come up a couple times lately and after much discussion with the developer (thanks Varsha), here is the answer. When an application looks for a resource, it looks...

This post demonstrates how to manually center a window with respect to both a WPF and non-WPF owner window. Centering a Window with a WPF Owner Window To center a window over another window in WPF, you need to do two things. First, you need to set...

You may have noticed that WPF does not contain some of the standard common dialogs you've come to expect in Win32 API sets. For example, the Win32 Common Dialog Box Library contains a standard user-interface model for dialogs, such as Open, Print, Color...

Members of the WPF 3D team have provided a list of 3D classes and properties with performance implications, along with recommendations for optimizing performance when you use them....

Want to learn how to host web content in WPF, load Word Docs into WPF, etc? How about calling HTML script and Word from WPF and vice versa? Attached is a simple sample that demonstrates using the WebBrowser control to host content. Specifically, it shows...

Some of the FAQs about data binding are: • How do I bind to a method? • How do I bind between instantiated controls? • How do I bind an ItemsControl to an enum? I put together a quick sample that should answer the above questions: < Window...

Introduction Windows Presentation Foundation features quite a variety of different mechanisms that provide notifications of when a property changes its value. These mechanisms come from several different feature areas: from data binding, from the WPF...

You can make the most of the globalization and localization functionality that is built into Windows Presentation Foundation by following the UI design and localization-related tips that this section provides. Best Practices for WPF UI Design When...

In WPF, there are a number of effects you can add on top of UI like drop shadows, glows, blurs and more using Bitmap Effects. Adding Bitmap Effects is VERY easy. Below is an example of a drop shadow bitmap effect applied to a button. The image above...

You may have a scenario that requires you to find an element within a ControlTemplate. To do that, you use Template.FindName. Say you have a simple ControlTemplate for a Button, like the following: < Style TargetType = " {x:Type Button...

I love LINQ, so I'm on a mission to use it in as many samples as possible. This one is pretty trivial but it took me a bit to put together all the pieces of loading up the xml file to getting the binding to recognize the correct attributes. Finally I...

Silverlight introduced the Visual State Manager, which makes it easier for control template authors to specify the appearance of a control depending on its visual state. The WPF Toolkit ships a Visual State Manager, and the next version of WPF will include...

Although WPF animations are easy ( see earlier post ), that doesn't mean there aren't some tricky areas of animations you should be aware of. The WPF animation team and SDK just created a list of tips and tricks for working with animations that we will...

Shows how to generate XAML DrawingImage objects from Graphic Designer using the XAML Export feature. The exported XAML drawing content is then used in several examples as XAML ResourceDictionary objects....

WPF provides a rich assortment of features that allow you to create compelling data visualization applications. This posting shows how you can take static image data and display it at defined intervals, in order to create an animation-like effect. ...