Pixel-in-Gene

UI libraries in general have always been single-threaded. This means that you can access the UI controls only from the thread that created it (thread-affinity). When running long-running operations you would typically use a background thread to do that job. However progress needs…

Several weeks back I had posted a simulation of the Genie effect that you see in Mac OSX. Ofcourse it was created using the Windows Presentation Foundation ;) However the effect could only be used in that specific demo. There was no way for example to use it in my other…

In Part 3 of this series I made some changes which allowed Drag and Drop across Windows and Applications. Although it works well, someone pointed out in the comments to that post, that the drag-point was always at (0,0) even though the user may have clicked somewhere inside the…

In my previous blog posts ( Part 1 , Part 2 ) on this topic, I have discussed how you can add drag-drop behavior to your application using attached properties. This greatly simplifies the event hook-up, keeps the XAML clean and literally gets rid of code-behind. However the…

Creating custom controls have been greatly simplified in WPF. There are some good practices that people have followed and I have documented some of them here . Although most examples show how to create new UserControls or custom controls derived from existing controls like…

In my previous post on this topic , I gave a quick overview of how Drag and Drop can be accomplished using attached properties. To review, here are the key elements of the implementation: DragDropManager — top level class that exposes the attached properties ( DragSourceAdvisor…

I recently asked a question in the WPF forums about loading xaml components from unreferenced assemblies, using Application.LoadComponent() API. This is a useful scenario especially if you are developing a plugin architecture for your application. Zhou Yong from the forums…

I am a big fan of attached properties and I think it is one of the coolest innovations in WPF. Once you understand the basics of using and creating attached properties, lot of the common activities that typically require some code-behind can be pushed to a class that implements…

While testing my new Custom Window control (which I should be blogging about soon) I ran into an interesting problem. The custom window control derives from System.Windows.Window and has its own ControlTemplate defined in its generic.xaml file. Now I have an application that…

In XAML, when you want to reference a CLR type, you have to add a namespace mapping that maps the XML namespace to the CLR namespace, like so: xmlns:local="clr-namespace:MyTestApp.Controls;assembly=TestApp.Controls" However the Types from PresentationFramework and…