Delay's Blog

The October 2009 release of the Silverlight Toolkit came out on Monday and the Data Visualization assembly includes some nice updates. I discussed the details of the new release then and promised to revise my samples to run on the new bits. While I anticipated doing things separately, it turned out to be easier to do everything at once. Here goes! :)

Silverlight/WPF Data Visualization Development Release 2

In the grand tradition of Data Visualization Development Releases, I've updated things to match the most recently released Toolkit code. In this case, that's the Silverlight Toolkit, so the code in the new Development Release is identical to what just went out with the Silverlight Toolkit. That means there's a bunch of new code for WPF here! People using Data Visualization on WPF can take advantage of the latest changes by updating to the binaries included with this Development Release or by compiling the corresponding code themselves. The release notes detail all the changes; there's nothing to call out here.

[Click here to download the SilverlightWpfDataVisualization solution including complete source code and pre-compiled binaries for both platforms.]

DataVisualizationDemos Sample Project Updated

The DataVisualizationDemos application is a collection of all the Data Visualization samples I've posted to my blog. Like the Data Visualization assembly itself, the demo application runs on Silverlight and WPF and shares the same code and XAML across both platforms. Not only is it a convenient way to look at a variety of sample code, it also has links back to the relevant blog posts for more detail about each sample.

Click here to download the complete source code for the cross-platform DataVisualizationDemos sample application.

Notes:

• New to this release of the DataVisualizationDemos is my simple Column annotations sample.
• I've added out-of-browser support to the Silverlight version of DataVisualizationDemos so users can easily install it and/or run it outside the browser.
• Both flavors of DataVisualizationDemos now take advantage of custom icons for a little bit of added flair:
• Because this version of the Data Visualization assembly contains a breaking change, the DataVisualizationDemos project can no longer use the assembly that shipped with the WPF Toolkit (or else both platforms wouldn't be able to share the same samples). Therefore, DataVisualizationDemos uses the WPF assembly from Data Visualization Development Release 2.
• Which means TreeMap (added after the WPF Toolkit release) can now be part of the WPF version of DataVisualizationDemos!

• If you're doing cross-platform development, sometimes you'll come across a control that lives in two different places. When that happens, it's hard to share the same XAML for both platforms - unless you know a trick! My usual technique for this is to declare my own same-named subclass in code (which automatically resolves to the right platform-specific class thanks to the namespace):

  public class DockPanel : System.Windows.Controls.DockPanel
  {
  }
  

  And then use my "custom" control (after adding the corresponding XML namespace declaration):

  <local:DockPanel ... />

  That works swell most of the time - except for when the class is sealed like Viewbox is on Silverlight... So I came up with a slight tweak of this strategy that solves the problem:

  #if SILVERLIGHT
      // Silverlight's Viewbox is sealed; simulate it with a ContentControl wrapper
      public class Viewbox : ContentControl
      {
          public Viewbox()
          {
              Template = (ControlTemplate)XamlReader.Load(@"
                  <ControlTemplate
                      xmlns=""http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation""
                      xmlns:controls=""clr-namespace:System.Windows.Controls;assembly=System.Windows.Controls.Toolkit"">
                      <controls:Viewbox>
                          <ContentPresenter/>
                      </controls:Viewbox>
                  </ControlTemplate>");
          }
      }
  #else
      public class Viewbox : System.Windows.Controls.Viewbox
      {
      }
  #endif
  

  And then just use it the same as above:

  <local:Viewbox ... />

The latest Data Visualization release has some nice improvements - I hope these two updates help people understand the new functionality and make it even easier to upgrade!