Essential WPF

Customizing Windows 7 Taskbar from WPF – Part 3 (Jumplist Markups) by Tomer Shamam

In my previous posts I’ve demonstrated how to customize the Windows 7 Taskbar Jumplist with custom icons and actions. In this post I would like to show how to leverage XAML Markup Extensions to pick the right assembly name for both the application full path and icon resource full path. One real bizarre thing in the WPF Jumplist is that there is no option to initialize some Jumplist properties after created from XAML. For example: The JumplistTask application path. The only option is to create the...

Customizing Windows 7 Taskbar from WPF – Part 2 (Jumplist Custom Actions) by Tomer Shamam

In my previous post I showed how to use a native resource in a .NET application and how to pick a custom icon for Jumplist Tasks. In this post I would like to show how to activate custom actions from the Windows 7 Jumplist, exactly like Window Media Player and other applications do. Programs designed for Windows 7 can take advantage of the taskbar features for quickly activating application’s common actions even though the application is minimized. Actions could be added to both thumbnail toolbars...

Customizing Windows 7 Taskbar from WPF – Part 1 (Jumplist Custom Icon) by Tomer Shamam

Windows 7 Taskbar Jumplist takes you right to your favorite applications or frequent files related to your application running in the task bar. To open a Jump List, just right-click a program icon on the Windows 7 taskbar and the Jumplist pops up. If you look in MSDN for the WPF 4 JumpList class you’ll see a very nice code snippet which creates Jumplist tasks but uses an external DLL as the source of the tasks icons. First you should know that the WPF 4 JumpList is only a managed wrapper around the...

Resources in WPF are Shared and Lazy by default by Tomer Shamam

I’ve just read a post of Christian Mosers listing “ Top 10 WPF Performance Tips ”. I agree with most of them, as they are general tips, but except for one: “ Load resources when needed . Even thow it's the most comfortable way to merge all resources on application level it can also cost performance by loading all resources at startup. A better approach is to load only often used resources and load the other on view level” Resources in WPF are lazy load and shared by default. If you place a resource...

Running on Windows Phone 7 Emulator or real Device by Tomer Shamam

In one of the labs I’m writing for the Windows Phone Training Kit I’m using kind of GPS Emulator for simulating a geographic location (Latitude, Longitude). This simulator comes in handy when writing location aware application, and you don’t really have a GPS on the emulator. So instead of using C# pragmas for picking the correct path, knowing whether the application is running on a real device or not, there is an easy static property for checking that: if (Microsoft.Devices. Environment .DeviceType...

Microsoft Open House Summary - WPF 4 and Blend 4 by Tomer Shamam

To all of you who participated in my WPF 4 and Blend 4 lecture at Microsoft Raanana today, it was my pleasure. I hope that you enjoyed and learned one or two things new about WPF.   You can download the presentation and demo code from here . Hope to see you soon.

Prism 4 Release by Tomer Shamam

Prism 4 November 2010 has been released yesterday by Karl Shifflett. This version of Prism 4 targets: .NET Framework 4.0 Guidance around the MVVM pattern Navigation Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) You can read more about it here , and download it from here . Enjoy.

Microsoft Open House - WPF 4 and Blend 4 by Tomer Shamam

  Next week, 14/11/2010 I’m having a session about Building Rich Client Applications with WPF 4 and Expression Blend 4 at Microsoft Israel, Raanana, and I’m going to present new features in WPF 4 such as the new Ribbon control and talk about how to develop WPF UI applications which work on Blend 4.   Feel free to register , it’s free. Hope to see you there.

WPF vNext Features by Tomer Shamam

I’ve found one session dedicated to WPF at this year PDC delivered by Rob Relyea, and from what I’ve saw, WPF continues to be the best Microsoft’s .NET UI technology for ISV’s, building application for Windows OS, and he talked about Microsoft Products based on WPF such as Visual Studio 2010, Blend and others. An interesting part of his lecture dedicated to features in the WPF vNext and was very excited to see some of them. Unfortunately some of them kept in the closet as usual. So what WPF team...