Every week I find something new and interesting in WPF. Occasionally it’s something big, like the week I labored over my first 3D application. Other times it’s smaller, like that little aha moment, when I realized that the way I’ve been thinking about events is wrong. That treating events like I did in .NET 2.0 works but by doing so I’m missing out on subtle advantages of the .NET 3.0 framework. Usually after discovering one of these new gems I find myself staring blankly at the wall thinking about the possibilities. Do you find your self doing that?
It seems like there are countless permutations and ways to combine the fundamentals of WPF. And it’s our job as designers and developers to figure out how to utilize these tools to make rich and compelling interfaces. We’ve all seen the demos where someone creates a seventeen color button or makes a textbox spin around the screen. Sure that’s different but it isn’t going to win any design awards and your users won’t be any happier.
WPF gives us palette of tools that we could only dream of 10- 15 years ago. We need to rethink our interfaces, to re-imagine the boundary between what the user want to accomplish and what we show them on their screen.
Which brings me to the point of this post.
Re-imagining the Color dialog
WPF doesn’t have a color dialog. You can call the Windows Color dialog but it’s going to look like it did in Windows XP. Depending on the type of WPF application you are writing you may find that the old style dialog may clash with your elegant new UI.
Think for a minute or two…..
Imagine how you would build a WPF replacement for the Color dialog.
Think for a minute or two…..
Let’s see how Shawn did it.
Shawn Van Ness has a knack for writing clever applications. He created a ScrollViewer for Lefties and replacement for RegSvr32.
Now he’s built the ‘ColorComb’ (with source code).
Interesting features
- Ink Preview
- Hexagon shapes
- Gradient fills in each color hex
- Show opacity in slider using a mask
-Walt
New and Notable 133
A N&N from Brussels Belgium where I am up in the middle of the night (again I wake up at 3AM!) with
is the source code for Shawn’s color picker actually available somewhere? I see no way to get it from his blog.
Thanks,
Eric