Manicprogrammer

It was rather nice. For a few minutes earlier today, I was able to experience the designer's perspective of Blend. We had a bug filed on one of our common controls' visual appearance, and a designer and a developer were pairing on cleaning it up. They asked me how to structure something, and I was able to completely restructure the UI model of ...

Effective _now_, we are hiring a single experienced individual into an architect or senior developer role. If you have a desire to work with an incredible team, have great .NET coding skills, and have a desire to see your work become a real product in the marketplace, contact me ASAP. (eric dot willeke at gmail dot com) If you already have ...

I've managed to get past the random issues that seem to plague me when adopting new technologies, and I'm digging into the meat of Silverlight 2.0 (Beta 1). This is GREAT! Blend is a great tool, and they've made using resources SO MUCH BETTER! The visual studio XAML editor works VERY well. (Intellisense bonuses: clr-namespace tags are descriptive ...

A signed copy of his  new book arrived in the post yesterday, I'm looking forward to digging into it. I'll shamelessly give plugs to good products on this blog, so long as they're good ;) As for the book itself, I read into the introduction a bit, and so far I think I like his style this time around better than Code + Markup. We'll ...

I've got a login screen with a TextBox, a PasswordBox, and a Button (yeah yeah, just like everybody else). Type login, hit tab, type password, hit tab, hit spacebar to click the button. (So far so good) I did it right, so my new Page opens within my Frame (Yeah, that's the point) But, I don't see any of the controls focused like I'd expect. And ...

Hopefully you don't need to do this often, but in our case we have a special hardware integration need to either handle or ignore the F10 key. However, F10 doesn't generate a KeyDown event with e.Key == Key.F10. Instead, do this:          void Window_KeyDown(object sender, KeyEventArgs ...

This is neat. I've been annoyed for quite a while that I haven't figured out how to ''enroll'' things in a StackPanel into columns for alignment and consistency... I've wanted basic control layouts (no sorting, selection, etc) to have a roughly ''Gridbased'' alignment, but haven't been able to figure out how to do so without going up to a ListView ...

Sheva's Techspace is talking about trees at http://shevaspace.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!FD9A0F1F8DD06954!581.entry I've added a comment with my ''work around'' to that specific problem, and I'm curious what other people have seen/done.  

From: http://blogs.msdn.com/jaimer/archive/2007/07/04/forcing-a-wpf-binding-to-refresh.aspx Now I'll find it again, since it took me five minutes to find that link even after using it once. BindingOperations.GetBindingExpressionBase(_dependencyObjectWithBinding, TextBlock.SomeDependencyProperty).UpdateTarget();  

I was frustrated yesterday because I had 8 different buttons on a screen that were perfect for RoutedUICommand bindings with the CommandParameter set to a different value on each. However, they each also needed a different KeyGesture attached, and as far as I knew yesterday, you only could tie gestures to commands through the Command.InputGestures ...

It appears so! I had a nice informative binding working in my window's frame, did some refactoring, and it disappeared. My property accessors just weren't getting called.  Here's the interesting code, which was bound using the notation that follows:         // Local object accessor to make the binding ...

Ask and I shall receive! A few days ago I mentioned that I'd love to get in touch with people that use WPF daily like I do, and then mdizzy starts commenting on my blog! He posts over at his blog, Brownie Points, and based on the images does quite a bit more graphics work than I ever will.  

''Hack'' or ''Good Thing'' -- What do you all think? I wanted to factor out some minor calculations from one of my screen, things like updating a total based on the sum of some other balances. To support this, I created an object named BatchCalculator and added some get/set properties and a couple of get-only calculated properties. I wired up ...

I have a custom control that serves as a generic container for selecting a specific instance of one of a number of types of objects. This container handles the different types by swapping out other user controls as appropriate to what's being selected, for instance I may have a FooPicker user control and a BarPicker user control. Each of these ...

Well not really a rant, more of a lamentation that Blend, like every other [web] designer before it, doesn't really understand the concept of dynamic layout. WPF finally offers a VERY dynamic layout system, but blend, when you move things around still hard codes sizes and/or margins to make the dynamic containers (grids, dock panels, and stack ...

I realized I have a distinct lack of people on my IM list that I can throw out a quick question regarding WPF to... frustrating when every other tech on my used list has an expert within easy messaging distance... Don't suppose any other WPF experts (or, like me, wanna-be experts) are out there reading this and sharing the same pain ;) If so, ...

I made my first one today... and it ''just worked''. I have a bunch of Page objects that need to push buttons into a shared space in the window's frame. How do I do this? Easy! I just define a dependency property on the root window of type IList< RoutedUICommand> and set that on any pages that need buttons... On each page, I define a ...

and, I'm not talking about the type that plugs into an IDE and lets somebody play at being a prolific programmer by generating thousands of lines of code... I'm talking about the living, breathing, ARTISTIC types... the guys who talk about colors and margins and padding and know what it means to the people looking at your app. I've recently had ...

My understanding of the .NET design philosophy is that if you handle an event with an empty handler, it should behave essentially as if you had not handled the event at all.  This may not be the case, but it seems to be in most things... if you handle the Close window event and don't do anything, the window still closes. However, with WPF, ...

Well, having tried the free Xceed data grid for a while, and not being fully pleased, I'm going to give Infragistics control a try. They've released the XamDataGrid for free (link currently broken?), and also put out a promotional on their full suite for MSDN subscribers for only $199 a seat. My biggest concerns at this point will be their ...

http://phacker.wordpress.com/2007/05/02/new-team-system-sig-in-indianapolis/ That's right - a special interest group, IN INDY, dedicated to team system (and by extension, team foundation)  This could be very good. Way to go, Paul! 

I've been reading a lot about Triggers in WPF styles, but I didn't have much call to use them yet since we're still working on getting a UI out there and databound for a decent slice of the app... we haven't really started looking at nifty UI behavioral effects yet, and Triggers only work against DependencyProperty objects. Well, thanks to this ...

 Took me a while to figure it out, so here it is.         <TreeView Name=''_orgSelectionTree'' >            <TreeView.ItemContainerStyle>                <Style>   ...

Just so I remember (Company.Product.Module is the naming convention we use for both namespaces and assemblies)               <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>                <ResourceDictionary ...