knom's developer corner : WPF

Slides and Demos from BigDays 2009 are online!

knom — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:22:00 GMT

These days I'm travelling around austria with our biggest developer & IT Pro event Big>Days 2009!

This year's theme was "packen wir's an" - translated "let's get to work"!

Accompanying the theme we built a multi-tier application with .NET 3.5 and Silverlight called "Rent-A-Worker"!

You can download the sources at http://www.codeplex.com/BigDays09/!

If you're interested in the slides of my four sessoins, feel free to get them here

WPF Webcast - New Year's resolutions

knom — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 13:34:39 GMT

I’ve a lot of New Year’s resolutions for 2009 :-) One of them is to blog more often (we’ll see how this works..) another is to do a series of webcasts around WPF.
We’re starting with our first WPF webcast on Friday, January 9th at 10am with an overview over WPF and XAML.

Topics we’ll cover:
*) Why a new UI framework
*) What tools, frameworks, .. do we need for WPF?
*) What is XAML, what is it’s syntax.

>> Register now at the Webcast Website

WPF Day in Dublin

knom — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:56:00 GMT

Last week I was in Dublin doing two sessions on WPF for Microsoft Ireland.

They did a "Client-UI Day", where they featured WPF and Silverlight.

The first session was given by the Irish Developer Evangelist Ronan Geraghty, who did an introduction to the Microsoft Client Platform, showing the differences between AJAX, Silverlight, WPF and when to use what.

Next I did a WPF for beginners session, where I showed all the details of XAML, Databinding, Styles, Templates, etc...

Afterwards my colleague Martha Rother from Ireland did a session on Silverlight.

Last but not least I showed how to leverage WPF and Composite WPF Guidance ("Prism") to build business applications.

Overall a really nice event, with around 80 attendees and a lot of interesting ideas and feedback on the Microsoft Client Continuum.

If you're interested in my slides on WPF Introduction and Composite WPF, find them here:

WPF Sessions.zip

Going home from Ireland I took two flights via London.. What a bad choice.. I drove to Dublin Airport at 6:30 am, arriving in Vienna at 5pm :-) Almost half a day of traveling and waiting...

A Valuable Tool for WPF and Silverlight

knom — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 12:14:50 GMT

Working with WPF & Silverlight is really great!

The only problem if you use it in production is how you quickly generate new views. They don't need any animations or other stuff, just plain details views.

You could do it with Expression Blend or the Visual Studio WPF Designer, still it would take more time than doing it directly in XAML..

But.. Who is interested in writing 30 or so views in XAML ?!

There is a better solution: XAML Powertoys.

XAML Powertoys are a bunch of Visual Studio 2008 additions which really ease your daily work with XAML (either in WPF or in Silverlight).

Let's say you have an entity Person and you want to create a list view for it.

Just select "Create Form, ListView,.." in the "XAML Power Toys" context menu within the XAML designer.

Next you select the type..

Next you can select the type of UI you want to create (either form, WPF ListView or the new DataGrid control).

You can select the participating data fields from the class and configure how they are bound, etc...

That's it.. The XAML is automatically created and copied into your clipboard. Just paste it at the corresponding position and your UI is ready!

> Get the XAML PowerToys here.

But don't forget to add the install-path to trusted Add-In paths under Tools-Options:

Using the VS Templates for Composite-WPF-Guidance

knom — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:28:28 GMT

This is about using the templates for a new project.

First of all you need to download the templates and install them from the links below.

Download the ZIP-File containing sources and built binaries here.

See the post on how to install the binaries or build the sources here.

Let's start setting up our new project:

Create a new root folder for your solution (e.g. C:\temp\DemoClient\).
Within the root folder create a Libraries (or other named) folder for the P&P assemblies, like Unity and Composite App Library.
Copy the necessary assemblies to the Libraries folder (build the Composite Application Guidance projects to get them):
Now open Visual Studio choose "File - New Project" and select "Composite WPF Solution" from "Visual C# > Composite App Guidance".
Enter the name of your overall solution (like "CompositeClient") and specify the root folder created before.

Important: "Create directory for solution" should be unchecked, to automatically insert references later. Press "OK" then.
A new wizard pops up:

You can now change your root namespace or the namespaces for the shell and infrastructure project.
It's important to specify the relative path to the Library folder (starting from the specified root folder). In this case it's Libraries. After that, the new solution is going to be created.
Select "Add New Project" on the Modules folder.
Choose "Composite WPF Module" and enter the Modules path of the solution as the location
(e.g. C:\temp\DemoClient\CompositeClient\Modules\).
Enter a name for the module (e.g. CompositeClient.Modules.Foo).
The New Module Wizard pops up.

Press Finish (or change the IModule class name or module namespace).
A new project is created, containing an IModule implementation and a module controller class.
When choosing Add-New Item, you can add a new Composite WPF View and Presentation Model to the module.

Enter a name for the new items (not containing "View" or any other types). Just use "DoFoo" for instance.
The New View Wizard pops up, letting you choose the names for view, presentation model and interfaces.
Choose Finish.
A new subfolder is created, containing the files necessary for the view.

Note 1: When using the item template for the first time, you might get a dialog requesting to trust the template. Press trust there!

Note 2: The wizards say "Composite WPF Guidance Contrib", as I hope to get into the Contrib project with this ;-)

Visual Studio Templates - Composite WPF Guidance - Installation

knom — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:25:10 GMT

First of all download the template package from here.
For an overview of the functionality see another post.

Extract the zip file and move to the Bin folder.

In the bin folder three files are located:

install.bat does all the work to setup the templates (run the .VSI and add the .DLL to the global assembly cache)
CompositeTemplateWizards.dll contains the Wizards used from the project templates. This assembly must be installed into the GAC.
Templates.vsi is VSI installer package with all the templates (need the wizard assembly in the GAC).

If you prefer building the code by yourself have a look into the Source folder. What you have to do is build the C# project, and zip all the project templates. Then zip all three zip-files together with the .VSContent file to a .ZIP archive and rename it to .VSI.

Have fun :-)

And see this post for usage of the templates.

.NET Roadshow - Demo Solution

knom — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:07:00 GMT

The demo solution from our .NET Beginners Roadshow is no ready for download for attendees and all others.

The scenario is event management.

The solution consists of 4 parts:

*) Data Access layer using ADO.NET Entity Framework

*) Business Logic Service hosted as a WCF service.

*) Web Site, written in ASP.NET, which allows attendees to register and view their events, including a

*) Silverlight Web Control

*) Desktop Client using WPF, for managing the events.

Here some screen shots:

Feel free to have a look at the source code here.

XTOPIA - WPF Workshop Video

knom — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 14:23:47 GMT

The video of my WPF session at the XTOPIA Conference earlier this year is now available online!

So have fun watching the 2h 4' of WPF fundamentals like data binding, styles, templates, XAML, etc...

WPF: Tired of xmlns="clr-namespace ..." ?!

knom — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 12:03:29 GMT

I'm sure you all know the problem: When using custom objects or controls in XAML you need to add a xmlns:bla="clr-namespace:MyDotNetSpace" declaration to each XAML file (which can be thought of as the C# using statement).

Although this is now comfortabely supported by Visual Studio Intellisense, some other solution would be nicer to have..

As I always want to do things like "Microsoft" does ;-), I thought of ways how to add my .NET namespaces into such nice looking Uri namespaces..

I found the solution for it, which is really easy:

[assembly:XmlnsDefinition("http://blogs.msdn.com/knom/wpf/XmlnsDemo", "Knom.WPF.XmlNs")]
namespace Knom.WPF.XmlNs
{
    ...
}

Just decorate your namespace with this XmlnsDefiniton attribute and map an Xml-namespace to your .NET namespace.

Now you can simply reference the namespace by using:

xmlns:my="http://blogs.msdn.com/knom/wpf/XmlnsDemo"

Tired of using the prefix (like my:..)? For this there're two tricks:

[assembly:XmlnsPrefix("http://blogs.msdn.com/knom/wpf/XmlnsDemo", "max:")]

This will specify a default prefix of max: for the xml namespace. If you drag in the control in the designer, this prefix will be generated for the namespace.

An interesting, but dangerous option is multiple .NET <--> XML namespace mappings: You can map different .NET namespaces into one xml namespace.

Consequently you can map YOUR .NET namespace into the default xaml namespace like this:

[assembly: XmlnsDefinition("http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation", "Knom.WPF.XmlNs")]

This way your namespace is now part of the XML namespace normally included as default namespace. So you won't need to specify ANY prefix for your classes. Disadvantage: The transparency which class is included in which assembly is lost..

WPF Workshop

knom — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 14:35:00 GMT

Here are the slides and demos to my workshop on Windows Presentation Foundation.

You'll find information and demos attached for the following topics:

XAML Basics
Dependency Objects & Routed Events
Layout Panels
Controls
Styles, Templates & Resources
Data Binding
Command Pattern
Custom Layout Controls (like Grid)
Custom Markup Extensions
WPF - Windows Forms Interoperability

This is a compendium of overall 116 slides, of which I showed only some during the presentation. So there's lots of background information and best practices in it as well.

Have a look at the slides (unfortuantely they're in German) or browser throught the demos!

Have fun!