Pixel-in-Gene

If you have ever tried animating the Width / Height of a Window control, you would notice some jerkiness during the animation. This happens because the Window control is not really living entirely in the WPF sandbox. It is part WPF and part Native. To achieve a really smooth…

In WPF, the standard way to control Z-Index (programmatically) is to use Panel.SetZIndex(). However that works well only if you plan to use a list of children inside a Panel. What if you want to get the Z-Index functionality in your own custom controls ? Override GetVisualChild…

Got some great ideas? Want to do it in WPF and also earn some big bucks? A “YES” means you should check out Lab49’s WPF Innovation Contest.

The DragDropManger has been a very handy class for me in couple of my projects. Since my last post I made some changes to the interfaces (IDragSourceAdvisor, IDropTargetAdvisor) and also to DragDropManager. There are no major changes except for a few method additions in the…

In one of my recent explorations in a project I had to implement a panel layout that displayed its items as cards that have been fanned out right- > left. Effectively the cards are laid out right-to-left, with the card on the right overlaying on the previous one. If the panel has…

Custom controls can be fun to develop. Depending on the complexity of the control it would be a good practice to break it down into manageable pieces. While developing ElementFlow , I discovered such a technique which you may also find useful. ElementFlow is a fairly complex…

Transitions , which is another word for animating between views, is a great way of keeping the user engaged as he interacts with your application. Most applications would contain a wide variety of views, where each view aids in interacting with a specific functionality of the…

Sometime back I had worked on an internal Instant Messaging client for our company. We were looking for some inspiration for our client interface and at about the same time the iPhone * * * * was introduced. After a lot of thought (which was like “few minutes”), we decided to…

The ElementFlow control was something I was working on a while back and I even posted about it here . The control originally derived from a FrameworkElement and had its own properties for enabling binding to a data-source, namely ElementsSource and ElementTemplate. These…

Recently Apple released their next version of iLife, which has some cool enhancements to iPhoto and iMovie. One specific enhancement called “skimming” was interesting from my project’s perspective. The idea is that when you scrub your mouse over an album, it skims through all the…