I'm still playing with WPF pretty routinely. I haven't posted much because I'm enjoying learning and playing more than writing about it, and honestly there is such a wealth of tutorials (in video, book, and article formats) that me writing about it is pretty useless unless it is covering some issue I really struggled with. I am considering writing a getting started with WPF guide eventually though, because all of the great resources for learning are spread around in a million places.

So far I am not running into major roadblocks, other than perhaps small things like using XMLDataProvider for an XML data island in XAML - if you do this always be sure to put xmnls="", because if no namespace is defined (even a blank one) then your bindings will not work - because it inherits the namespace of the XAML document itself. Little stuff like this really doesn't warrant writing a whole article, its just one of those little things you pick up on. So, until next time I'll just post more k-rad stuff going on with WPF..

First off, .Net 3.5 SP1 was released on Monday - the word on the street is that this is the 3rd major revision to WPF, with the first being .Net 3.0, the second being .Net 3.5, and then now 3.5 SP1 - it sounds like WPF really got a bunch of focus in this service pack. It includes a built in DataGrid for WPF, moves bitmap effects to the hardware tier for better performance, includes built in support for quick loading splash screens, and new control named D3Dimage - a way to use Direct3D right inside WPF. There is a video right now on Channel9 which shows off some of the new graphic abilities in SP1, it is definitely worth checking out.

I just got my hands on a new book, Programming WPF, after reading a ton of Amazon reviews. I would post more in this blog entry, but honestly I'm ready to get crackin' on this new book - until next time!

If you've been following Nerd Plus Art (which you should be doing) you'll notice a few recent blog posts of interest.

Last time we covered breaking our theming out into an external file, and how to style all instances of a given UI element. We left off needing to know the details of how to style more complicated items like buttons and their mouse-over and mouse-down appearances - that is what we will cover in this final part of the series.

The biggest thing we need to keep in mind with items like buttons or comboboxes is that their appearance can drastically differ based on a computer's operating system. You can get a feel of this by changing the Foreground of a button in Vista and seeing how when a button has focus its fill actually pulsates from the normal appearance to the mouseover appearance and back - this animation is unique to Vista and not seen in XP.

(click 'read more' for the rest of the article..)

So I've been under the weather (or at least that is one of my excuses), so I don't have the next part of my WPF series ready to post yet, but I do have a couple of links to fill your time.

First off, the latest Hanselman podcast is up. Apparently the creators of Line Rider have converted from Flash to Silverlight. This interview should be pretty interesting, you can find it here.

Last time we covered how to break out colors from our XAML dialog into separate color definitions in the Page.Resources section of our XAML. After doing this the next question is something like "how do I break out the color, font size, font face, etc. from each of my textbox definitions", and "how can I break these styling definitions out to a separate file" - those are what we will cover in this part of the series.

After breaking out my colors last time my footer definition ended up something like this:

    <!-- bottom panel (ok & cancel buttons) -->

    <StackPanel DockPanel.Dock="Bottom" Orientation="Horizontal" 

            FlowDirection="RightToLeft" Height="32" 

            Background="{StaticResource footerFillBrush}">

      <Button Width="72" TabIndex="45" Margin="2,2,2,2">Cancel</Button>      

      <Button Width="72" TabIndex="40" Margin="2,2,2,2">OK</Button>      

    </StackPanel>

It's cool that my background color isn't hard-coded now, but all the other styling elements are still hard-coded - that is where Style definitions come in. Style definitions basically allow you to define all the properties that should be set on an element in one spot. You can then assign the Style you created to a textbox, or a label, or any other UI element you might want to style. You give the Style a Key name just like you would a color definition and then tell the UI element to make use of that Style (there is another way to use styles across all items of a given type instead of specifying which one to use for every UI element - we will cover that towards the end of this article).

(click 'read more' to read the full article..)

One of the more obvious issues with the initial post of the dialog XAML code last night was all the hardcoded colors, so this post will be a quick example of how to use defined colors and gradients instead so that when you want to change the colors you don't have to go looking through all the XAML to find where the colors are to modify.

Here is a snippet of the original XAML, specifically the blue gradient header across the top of the dialog and the white text on it:

    <!-- Top Panel (icon, description, help, etc.) -->

    <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" Width="500" DockPanel.Dock="Top">

      <StackPanel.Background>

        <LinearGradientBrush StartPoint="0,0" EndPoint="0,1">

          <GradientStop Color="Navy" Offset="0" />

          <GradientStop Color="MidnightBlue" Offset="1" />

        </LinearGradientBrush>    

      </StackPanel.Background> 

      ..

      <TextBlock Width="358" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" Padding="4,4,4,0" 

                 TextWrapping="Wrap" Foreground="White">

      ..

    </StackPanel>

 
The easiest thing to do right off the bat is to just take the LinearGradientBrush definition and move it up to a Resources section you create for the Page (or Window, etc.) - since we are working with a Page we will create a Page.Resources section right under the main Page definition:

  <Page.Resources>

    ..

    <!-- header panel styles -->

    <LinearGradientBrush x:Key="headerPanelFillBrush" StartPoint="0,0" EndPoint="0,1">

      <GradientStop Color="Navy" Offset="0" />

      <GradientStop Color="MidnightBlue" Offset="1" />

    </LinearGradientBrush>

    <SolidColorBrush x:Key="headerTextColor" Color="White" />

    ..

  </Page.Resources>

 
There are two brushes defined in that snippet - the 'headerPanelFillBrush' which is the blue gradient fill in the header, and the 'headerTextColor' which is the white color used for the text - these brushes will be referenced by the value we set for their 'x:Key' tag.

(click 'read more' to read the full article..)

So after two or three weeks of playing around with WPF/XAML I figured the best place to go next was to try and do some dialogs like I might do today in Windows Forms. I wrote these by hand using the Kaxaml tool mentioned on the recent Scott Hanselman podcast, and if you have that installed you should be able to make use of the .xaml files attached to this post pretty easily.

Keep in mind that this XAML is by hand (with Kaxaml's intellisense), not created via Blend or VS2008, and the XAML is probably atrocious to XAML experts - that's sort of the point. I'll be referring back to this project as I improve it - this post is just the initial post.

A simple dialog

(click 'read more' to read the full article..)

About a year and a half ago I picked up a copy of Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed based on a suggestion from a Microsoft rep at a mini code camp they held for businesses in my business sector. I enjoyed the WPF/Silverlight discussion they had, especially since it gave me a chance to ask some questions on the subject, but aside from buying the book I made little actual effort in trying to learn WPF since then.