The ComboBox is not the most complex of the WPF applications, but it can be a little tricky, so lets do a general overview post of it before we go into the specifics of how we’re going to make it work.

First of all, if you’re going to test your comboBox design, you should have it hooked up to an ItemsSource. Don’t have one? I have a tutorial in which I walk through attaching an RSS feed to your control. It was originally written for the ListView, but it will work fine for a ComboBox.

To start out… this is your standard ComboBox:

When working on a comboBox, you have a couple of options for the Items inside the ComboBox. If the options never change and are not data-driven, you can just toss come ComboBoxItems into it. Otherwise, you can connect it to some kind of ItemsSource (see the link above).

All of my examples are done with a data-driven ComboBoxes, but you should get the desired results if you run through the tutorials with ComboBoxItems.

First, a little bit about the structure of the comboBox.

Continue reading ‘The WPF Designers Guide to Styling The ComboBox’ »

Karl Shifflett points to a wonderful life saver of a feature that I didn’t know existed until now.

With Visual Studio 2008, the project is always trying to load the design view with the XAML view. I get very frustrated by this… if I wanted to see the design view, I would open Blend.

Apparently, if you’re in VS2008, you can go to “Tools -> Options…” in the resulting window, open up the “Text” option and scroll down to “XAML -> Miscellaneous” Check the box that says “Always open docuemnts in full XAML view”

 Yay.

I’ve been spending the past several days fighting with the ComboBox in an attempt to make it so something very simple: Wrap text inside the combo box. I’ve finally figured it out, so I thought I’d share.

OK, first of all, make sure that your ComboBox is hooked up to something, even if that something is some random RSS feed. I have a post that can help you with that over here. Bind your comboBox to the “Items” part of the New York Times RSS feed.

You need to do this because, if you do not, you will have to set the same data template to every single ComboBoxItem that you add to the ComboBox. And that’s just no fun.

Starting out, your ComboBox should look something like this:

Right click on your ComboBox and select “Edit Other Templates -> Edit Generated Items (ItemTemplate)-> Create Empty…” Give your new data template a name and Blend will take you into the Data Template design.

Continue reading ‘How Do I Wrap Text (or Add TextEllipsis) In The ComboBox?’ »

OK, it’s really late and I want to get this done, so we’re going to go through the easy way, which will require some XAML, but I’ll try to keep it as Blend-y as possible.

So you have a column header and you want the text inside to wrap when the header space gets too short for the content. Your header probably looks something like this:

First, go to wherever your resources are being held and type the following in:

<Style x:Key=”CustomHeaderStyle“ TargetType=”{x:Type GridViewColumnHeader}“>
</Style>

Continue reading ‘How Do I Wrap Text in a ListView Header?’ »

(I’m getting to the point in a roundabout way… you can skip directly to the point below if you want.)

When I started working on my WPF-Wii tutorials, my first Wii project was the initial version of the WPF-Wii Visualizer.

However, I quickly got tired of writing the code for handling events and transferring the data from the Wiimote library to my application. So (like any noble geek would do) I wrote even MORE code to solve the problem, not only for myself, but for generations to come.

I’ve spend the last week writing a Wii-To-WPF library that shovels the Wiimote properties into properties that use the INotifyPropertyChanged WPF interface. This will allow anyone to connect to the Wii through the WPF data binding. It’s super cool.

(A point of note, I posted an early version of this library. Ignore it. I’m putting up a much improved version in the next couple days.)

The Point

But I had no idea how moving from a basic data transference and event handling to the INotifyPropertyChanged interface would affect my performance.

Here are some screenshots of Perforator (a WPF performance monitoring application) monitoring my WPF-Wii Visualizer in its code-heavy iteration:

I don’t know what all those numbers mean, but the one I’m interested in is the frame rate. As a designer, smoother motion is good… especially if I’m trying to design a multi-point application. A frame rate of 27 isn’t too bad, but this is the best I got. The frame rate usually hovered around 20, dipping as low as five.

Now… this is what I got when I was binding the data through the XAML (absolutely no code whatsoever):

And this was the worst I got. My frame rate was always in the mid 60s and would spike up to 80. Take note that I’m not changing the interface at all. In fact, I’m running the binding version at a handicap (it’s tracking four infrared points instead of the original two).

Exact same XAML … except that the XAML properties are data bound from within the XAML and not assigned via the C# code.

So, lets take an account of the WPF INotifyPropertyChanged interface:

• Allows DataBinding
• Permits code-light or code-free interface design
• Drastic improvements to performance

Use it!

Enough said.

I recently spent a couple hours trying desperately to bind a TextBlock to the Canvas.Left and Canvas.Top properties for a project I’m working on. My binding looked like this:

 {Binding ElementName=MyElement, Path=Canvas.Left, Mode=Default}

Couldn’t do it. I tried bloody everything to get this thing to work, but it wouldn’t do it.

Then I found this post on binding to attached properties, which is apparently what you call a property that is written as

<TextBlock Canvas.Left=”100”
      Canvas.Top=”100”
      Grid.Column=”1”
      Grid.Row=”1”
      Grid.ColumnSpan=”1”
      Grid.RowSpan=”1“ />

Forgive the redundancy… I’m trying to write this post so that anyone who is having this problem can find the solution.

So the correct binding (the one that works for me, anyway) is:

{Binding (Canvas.Left), ElementName=MyElement}

It works.

Why? I have no idea.

Just passing it along.

 OK, I hope no one is using my last post as an example of what you should be doing when interfacing the Wiimote with WPF. Because it was completely hack-tastic.

 Instead, use my new WPF/Wii library. It uses the WPF INotifyPropertyChanged interface to act as an interface so that we can bind the Wiimote data directly to the XAML. More on that in a little bit, but first…

In this post, we’ll walk through creating a basic multi-point capable app that uses the Wiimote as an input device. What is really unique about this post is the fact that we’re going to do this in a way that requires absolutely no code whatsoever on your part.

That’s right. No code. At all. Zero knowledge of C# required.

Continue reading ‘WPF Wii Multi-Point Tutorials, Part 2: Writing a Code-less Wiimote Program’ »

Please Read: Strangely, when you do a Google search for “wpf” and “listview”, this is one of the top links. This is odd because this particular post is kind of an advanced tutorial. If you’re looking for more general information on styling the wpf listview, check out this post. It is probably much closer to what you’re looking for.

This is a bit of an advanced tutorial. I’m putting it up because I just figured out how to do it and I want to share. You can also download the project files for this tutorial (in zip format… requires .Net 3.5).

Recently, I received from my user experience designers a wireframe that looked something like this:

As you can see, there are embedded categories (categories within categories) here. I considered many solutions (hacks), but I found that a deeper understanding of the ListView and how it works would allow me to resolve this issue very simply (and without even touching the code behind). Continue reading ‘Embedded ListView Columns (Columns Within Columns)’ »

ListView header Styling is one of the most difficult styling pieces I’ve had to deal with. Part of this is because it is just another part of the seemingly endlessly complex listview. The other part is just because of the way the styling for the listview is put together in WPF.

In this post, we’re going to change the default color of the header (background and foreground) and make the headers look more like bubbles. Why? Because we can! (Everytime I say that, somewhere a usability expert loses a little bit of their soul.)

Take note that anything done in this will affect the whole header. If you’re looking to do something to one individual column in the header, you need to go to this post on ColumnHeaders (coming soon). See the bottom of this post for more details.

As a point of note, the easy way in this particular case involves going directly into the XAML and the hard way involves going through the steps in Blend. The easy way is posted at the bottom.

Now for the hard way. First, go to your listview, right click on it and go to:

Edit Control Parts (Template) -> Edit a Copy…

Continue reading ‘Styling the ListView Column Header’ »

So the items in your ListView column look like this:

And you want them to look like this:

If you’re trying to center something within a ListView column, it’s actually pretty simple.

Continue reading ‘How Do I Center Something In My ListView Column?’ »