Essential WPF

10 Reasons to Love XAML by Tomer Shamam

Many of my customers and students ask me: What is XAML good for? Why do I have to write XAML if I can write WPF with code? So I decided to write a post about it, sorted by the most important to the less essential. 1. It’s the Designer best friend WPF is not just about another UI platform, it’s also a methodology. It provides new tools and concepts for creating a modern presentation layer. Programmers write code, but when it comes to drawing…, OMG! To overcome this problem, a new member is introduced...

VS2008 Freezes after a Build by Tomer Shamam

Did you noticed that each time you change a XAML file and build the project with Visual Studio 2008 it freezes for about 5 to 10 seconds (depends on your hardware)? If so you can stay calm. There is nothing wrong with your installation. It is a known issue with the XAML editor/designer in VS2008. The designer and part of the editor run in a separate AppDomain. This provides an option to reload the designer/editor with updated assemblies after a change (e.g. during a build). The problem caused by...

WPF ListView Vertical Lines (Horizontal as Bonus) by Tomer Shamam

It all started half year ago, after the Japanese (customer of my customer) UI designer sent a photo of how a ListView should look like. First we though: "Piece of Cake, WPF...", then we saw the weird, annoying vertical-lines that stuck in the middle of nowhere... So we decided to provide a solution later :-) Did you notice that neither WPF ListView (using a GridView as its view) nor custom grids such as Infragistics, Xceed, etc, provide an out-of-the-box vertical lines? Download this code...

WPF ComboBox and C# Enum - The Love Story by Tomer Shamam

Q: How can I bind a property of type Enum (of any kind) to a ComboBox or ListBox controls? I bet that you Googled this question more than once. Did you find the correct answer? Well, I saw a lot of them, with code or XAML only, sorted, filtered, grouped, etc. With all the respect, I didn't get a generic answer with a two-way data-flow to a single enum-type property . See these links as an example: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2430540&SiteID=1 http://joshsmithonwpf...