Essential WPF

UI Virtualization vs. Data Virtualization (Part 1)

Part 2 Being an LOB, composite applications infrastructure junky lately, I’ve been working around with several data-binding models and mechanisms to bind the data with the view, in a very efficient way of course. Sometime it was easy, and sometime it was not! I have had to find several workarounds to overcome both architectural and performance issues. In this post I would like to concentrate on Data Virtualization, and to compare it with UI Virtualization, which are very similar, yet different aspects...

WPF + MEF = Declarative Composite UI

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 Designer and Developer Collaboration

From time to time I read posts and see questions regard the collaboration between WPF developer and designer. So I decided to say few words about my experience and point of view. There are two popular models for developer/designer collaboration with WPF The designer mockup the UI , handing it to the developer for adding logic. With this model it is advised that the designer will be part of the team, and there should be a tight integration between the developer and the designer. I don’t like this...

10 Reasons to Love XAML

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...