January 2011 - Posts
Sela Developer Practice (SDP) is an annual conference held in Israel which will occur this year between 13 to 16 of March.
In this year’s conference I’m going to present on Marsh 14, a one-day seminar about Windows 7: New Features, Porting and Multi-Platform Support.
In this tutorial I'll present cool new features like the new Taskbar, Libraries, Multi-Touch support and the new Sensors API. We will focus on the practical aspects of programming a Windows 7 application. I'll present how to optimize your application performance by using Trigger Start Services, and new Power API. Finally, I'll present how to provide the best user experience to help your user troubleshoot your application in case something goes wrong. This seminar will include code samples in C# and C++ using Visual Studio 2010.
In addition to the one-day seminar, I also have a presentation on March 15 in the Client track on the topic WPF + Silverlight + Windows Phone 7 = 3-Screens Development where I’ll show how to develop an application to WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7, while maintaining a single code base. Also I plan to show some Azure features. Fun is guaranteed!
Hurry up and register - space is limited!
That’s it for now,
Arik Poznanski.
As you may already know, the ProgressBar control in Silverlight for Windows Phone has a serious performance problem when setting the IsIntermediate property to true. Basically it chokes the UI thread.
This was discussed and solved a few month ago by Jeff Wilcox.
Jeff’s solution was to replace the control template with a new one which looks the same but does a better job. This control template was part of a style which was kept in the application resources section. So to use this patch you also had to set the style for each ProgressBar you used.
Although this solution works great, I find it lacks some polishing..
So I here-by present you my ProgressBarWithText control.
ProgressBarWithText control wraps Jeff’s solution in an easy to use user control which already contains the new style and template. So using it is as simple as:
<local:ProgressBarWithText Text="Loading Posts..." ShowProgress="{Binding IsPostsLoading}" />
As you might already guessed from the post title, I’ve added a text block to the control which will be shown whenever the progress bar, well, progress…
The reason for adding this feature was that I’ve found that every time I use a progress bar, I wish to write a simple text near it, usually something like “Loading…”
The end result looks like this:
You can download here the source code for the control and sample application that uses it.
By the way, if anyone recognizes this class from the “Using Pivot and Panorama Controls” lab found in the Windows Phone Training Kit for Developers, that’s fine, it’s because I wrote this lab for Microsoft.
That’s it for now,
Arik Poznanski.
I’ve recently been announced that I was awarded the CodeProject MVP award for the year 2011!
The list of 2011 winners can be found here.
In this list you can find respectful members of the WPF community like: Josh Smith, Pete O'Hanlon, Sacha Barber and many more.
It is an honor for me to be part of this list.
In addition, I am now a MCTS (Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist) in Windows Application Development using .NET Framework 4, which basically means I passed Microsoft’s official WPF exam.
That’s it for now,
Arik Poznanski.
I have recently published a guide about Behaviors with WPF on the great site HWzone. My article was published as part of Microsoft’s & HWzone contest, announced not so long ago.
In this article I show how to use behaviors both in Blend 4 and Visual Studio 2010. In addition I present the steps needed in order to create a new behavior in WPF and show a working example of a behavior that adds a reflection effect to any FrameworkElement.
The article is written in Hebrew. If there will be enough demand I might translate it to English. Leave a comment if you would like that.
Happy New Year 2011!
That’s it for now,
Arik Poznanski.