Essential WPF

WPF 4 Multitouch Application testing with Microsoft Touch Mouse by Tomer Shamam

One of the greatest features in WPF 4 is the built-in support of Windows 7 multitouch gestures. Developing multitouch applications for Windows 7 you should have a special multitouch screen, and usually you don't have it, at least not in your development laptop. So you have to buy one, or use the PDC 2009 laptop: Acer Aspire 1420P give-away. The problem in such case is that you'll have to use remote-debug to debug your multitouch gestures, and it's awkward. There are several NUI alternatives...

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...