XAML and UI, whever it is found. Phone, Surface, Silverlight or WPF
Posted in Silverlight, Windows Phone, WP7, WPF on Jan 15th, 2011
There are times when I want to preview file content in Windows Explorer. The Preview pane in Explorer makes this a simple task. Just click the Preview pane button and select the file as shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2. Figure 1: The preview pane button. Figure 2: Viewing a .txt file. In [...]
Posted in WPF on Oct 4th, 2010
Hard coding the size of control is not a good choice in many situations. If you specify the height of a button and the font size increases you might see the bottom of your text clipped. If you hard code the width of the button it can’t grow or shrink to accommodate changes in content [...]
Posted in Shazzam, Silverlight, WPF on Jul 10th, 2010
I hear from a reliable source that Shazzam 1.3 is shipping next week, on July 12th, 2010. Here’s a taste of the new Generative_Mandelbrot.fx Now the WPF supports PS_3 shaders, this example can probably be enhanced further. Want to take a shot at it? Subscribe to the Shazzam Shader Editor blog to learn more. [...]
Keeping your application responsive while under load is important. If you assign the UI thread to do time intensive work you are asking for trouble as it will prevent the UI from updating. This will cause the application to appear unresponsive. The solution, of course, is to assign the task to a worker thread instead [...]
Posted in WPF on Jan 18th, 2010
When you use a XAML element like <Button> in your Silverlight application you get an instance of the System.Windows.Controls.Button class. Namespace mapping is what links the XAML namespace “xmlns=http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation” in your XAML file with the real .NET namespaces that contain the .NET types. This mapping is accomplished via the XmlnsDefinitionAttribute class. At some point in [...]
Posted in Expression, PDC, Silverlight, WPF on Nov 13th, 2009
One of the neatest additions to Expression Blend 3 is the Effects pane. You’ll find it in the Asset panel. This makes it dead simple to add an effect to an item on the Blend Artboard. Just drag the effect onto the desired item and you get an instant effect. The effect is easy to [...]
A common dilemma while attending big conferences is choosing which sessions to attend. Look around you at break time and you’ll see scores of attendees analyzing the conference schedule and making pencil marks next to the talks they find interesting. Once they’ve settled on a plan they scurry off to the session, grabbing a few [...]
Posted in Visual Studio, WPF on Oct 24th, 2009
I’ve mentioned MSDN Code Gallery in the past but let me call it out once again. Microsoft maintains two sites for sharing content. CodePlex (http://www.codeplex.com/) Codeplex is intended to be the home for your open source code project. As such it sports a number of project level enhancements: a version control system (which supports Team [...]
Composite Application Guidance (Prism) has been out for over a year and is currently at version 2.0. There are a handful of articles out on the web showing how to create a simple Prism application. Be aware that many of these refer to version 1.0 of Prism and have outdated advice and syntax. As always, [...]
Posted in Shazzam, Silverlight, WPF on Oct 5th, 2009
I’ve been posting about Shazzam for over a year on my WpfWonderland blog. Now that Shazzam version 1.1 is about to be released I figure that it is time to setup a dedicated blog. http://blog.shazzam-tool.com News and discussion regarding the Shazzam Pixel Shader Utility. Yes, that’s the goal. To have a place to describe upcoming [...]
