Essential WPF

Implicit DataTemplate in Silverlight 4 Composite UI – Get ready for Silverlight 5 (Part III) by Tomer Shamam

In this post I'll show how did I implemented the ItemsControl implicit data-template using the ImplicitItemsTemplateBehavior attached behavior. But first, lets talk a bit about how WPF searches for an implicit data template, given a collection of items, so we can mimic that behavior in Silverlight. Having an ItemsControl with an ItemsSource property set to a collection of type Shape, WPF looks at the ItemsControl.ItemTemplate. In case that one is missing, and there is no ItemTemplateSelector...

Implicit DataTemplate in Silverlight 4 Composite UI – Get ready for Silverlight 5 (Part II) by Tomer Shamam

In this post I'll show how did I implemented the ContentControl implicit data-template using the ImplicitContentTemplateBehavior attached behavior. But first, lets talk a bit about how WPF searches for an implicit data template, given a content, so we can mimic that behavior in Silverlight.   Having a ContentControl with a Content set to an instance of type Circle, WPF looks at the ControlControl.ItemTemplate. In case that one is missing, and there is no ItemTemplateSelector, it changes...

Implicit DataTemplate in Silverlight 4 Composite UI – Get ready for Silverlight 5 (Part I) by Tomer Shamam

I'm using Prism 4 in one of my Silverlight 4 Composite UI. Working with Prism, there are two ways populating a Region: You can populate it with a UI element, which is the view, or placing the view-model directly. Personally I support the idea that a UI element must not be treated directly from the Application logic, and there should be ZERO UI elements in the Application logic. So natively, populating a region with a view-model instead of a view sounds more reasonable for me. With WPF things...

Blendability Part II – Design time support for Prism by Tomer Shamam

In my previous post I’ve presented the Blendability concept and explained how to leverage Blend’s sample-data generation in order to support view-model at design time. In this post I would like to continue with this concept and reveal a tiny research I’ve done related to design time support of Prism modules. If you’ve ever developed a WPF Composite Application using Prism you may be aware of a frustrating problem while trying to work with the Shell at design time. It always ends with something like...

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.

SDP – WPF 4, MVVM, MEF and Friends by Tomer Shamam

Tomorrow, as part of the SDP conference, I’m having a whole day session dedicated to WPF 4 and LOB applications. What’s in there for you: Short intro to WPF Goodies in WPF 4 Building a Smart Client using WPF 4 Developing Composite Applications using Prism 2 In addition to all of this great stuff, Bnaya Eshet , my colleague at Sela will talk about MEF and how it’s related to WPF and LOB application. I’ll be more than happy to see you there.

Session – Advanced Topics for Building Large-Scale Applications with Microsoft Silverlight by Tomer Shamam

In this session, John Papa talked about Silverlight application development patterns such as composite applications with Prism, developing using the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern, and methods of implementing large, modular, multi-page applications within your team. Also he talked about frameworks created to help assist in rapid development using these patterns without sacrificing good application development patterns. MVVM is a pattern, there is no specific way to do it right. Also with Silverlight...

Composite UI Infrastructure Review by Microsoft, Redmond by Tomer Shamam

We’ve just returned back from our Composite UI Infrastructure architecture review by who else but the Prism creators, the Microsoft P&P team, and we’ve also discussed on several WPF issues we’ve got with the WPF team. I have such a great time meeting with David Hill, Blaine Wastell, Julian Dominguez, Rob Relyea, Mike Hillberg, Anson Tsao, Varsha Mahadevan and Jaime Rodriguez. I want to thank each and every one of you personally! Special thanks to Lior Rozner from Microsoft Israel for leading...

WPF Performance Sweets – ContentControl (Part 2) by Tomer Shamam

Part 1 Yesterday I went back to my customer, tried to figure out if the whole concept of using data as the content of a ContentControl instead of holding a logical tree, is truly contribute to the whole system, and guess what? It is not! Well it figured out that setting the content property with non-visual element only postponed the tree-traversal. We figured this out by trying to measure the total elapsed time between setting the content property to null and up until the view completely disappeared...

WPF Performance Sweets – ContentControl.Content = null by Tomer Shamam

Part 2 Background Yesterday I came back from my customers’ place. He had performance issues with his WPF composite application. Each time he navigates away from a page, he pays about 1400ms! – Playing around we’d found that each time a page was changed, the composite framework he uses replaces the old page with the new page by simply updating the ContentControl.Content (placeholder) with the new page. This operation solely took about 800ms! placeholder.Content = newPage; In this post I would like...

WPF + MEF = Declarative Composite UI by Tomer Shamam

I’ve been playing around with MEF lately and I have to say that it has a great potential for building Composite UIs. One of the sample applications arrived with MEF Preview 6 (called MEFLook) , demonstrates how to implement kind of Outlook composite application based on WPF. The interesting part of this application is that views can be imported into the main window as dynamic parts, simply by decorating them with the MEF Export attribute. < Window x : Class ="MeflookSample.MeflookShell"...

WPF Commands Everywhere by Tomer Shamam

It has been a long time since I’ve written something in my blog and there are many items in my stack. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to pop all, so I’ll try to peek few of my best thoughts. In the last few weeks I’ve started to work on a very interesting UI infrastructure project, based on WPF and Prism. I can’t give many details since it’s kind of confidential, but I can say that I work with very talented people, and Lior Rozner from Microsoft Israel is one of them. So enough about what I...

Prism on Microsoft Developer Academy III by Tomer Shamam

Microsoft Developer Academy III is coming soon and I’m going to lecture about Composite Application Guidance for WPF (Prism). So what is in my lecture for you: Well, the original abstract is about Composite UI Applications Challenges and Building WPF Enterprise Applications with Prism. But... Prism is really a lightweight presentation infrastructure, It contains guidelines and class library for building WPF Composite UI Applications. But what about other kind of UI applications? Can we leverage Prism...

Composite Application Guidance for WPF (Prism) Tour - Part 2 by Tomer Shamam

In the first post of this series I generally wrote about Prism and how can it fit in WPF applications. In this second post I would like to introduce a Home Automation application UI, show how to design it as a monolithic application, talk about the disadvantages of a monolithic application, and finally show how to design it as a Composite Application. What is a Home Automation? "For some it may be something as simple as remote or automatic control of a few lights. For others, security may be...

Composite Application Guidance for WPF (Prism) Tour - Part 1 by Tomer Shamam

If I would be asked, “What are the best two things happened to Smart Client and Desktop Applications developers in the last two years” I certainly would say “Microsoft's WPF and Prism infrastructures”. WPF is the aircraft’s Engines, and Prism is the HAL and this makes us proud to be an aircraft pilots. But it’s not enough to just sitting in the cockpit, wearing a pilot suit. We should know how to control both. With this post I want to start a series of posts regards Composite Application Guidance...