Silverlight Concepts Covered:

• Building a basic Silverlight project
• Creating code behind for a event triggered by the user
• Creating an HTML alert (a fake MessageBox) in Silverlight

Project Files are available for download at the bottom of the page.

Because I’m an interaction designer and not a coder, I find that there are certain things that can be very limiting for me. I’ve decided to fix that by learning how to code properly. To do so, I’m using a book that actually makes sense to me: Head First C#. If you’ve never used the Head First series, its generally a pretty good series zero-to-sixty book on the given topic which teaches by doing (the only way I’ve found I can learn anything).

Sadly, Head First C# currently uses WinForms for all user interfaces. This is the beginning of a series in which I’ll go through the book, but replace all the WinForms with Silverlight. I will very purposely not give the rest of the lessons because I have a nagging moral qualm in the back of my mind about taking someone else’s intellectual property and putting it up on my blog. Call me old fashioned.

I will, however, be going through the project and offering alternative code downloads of the projects (with Silverlight interfaces). I figure that, because the Heads First books allow free downloads of their project code on their website, they don’t mind me doing this on mine. If anyone from O’Reilly is reading this and disagrees, just let me know.

The first chapter has you building a program for entering and saving Contacts from start to finish. I will be pointing to the pages and listing alternative Silverlight steps

Pages 8-16

1. Start Visual Studio 2008 and select “Silverlight Application” from your list of options. The default “Web Page” options should be fine for what we’re doing.

2. Open up Expression Blend 2.5 (I’m using the June 2008 Preview) and find your project and open it.

3. Double Click on the Page.xaml file to open it up in Blend. We’re going to create the basics of our user interface here.

4. Go ahead and grab the “Objectville Paper Co” image from the Heads First web site. Right click on your project in Blend and select “Add New Folder”. Name your new folder “Images”. Right click on that folder, click “Add Existing Item…” and navigate the graphic you downloaded. Your project should look something like this:

5. Drag the image from the project to the canvas. Things may look a little crowded on the canvas, so lets make it a little bigger. Click the “Properties” tab (a) on the right side of Blend and make sure you have UserControl (the highest object in the tree) selected in the “Objects and Timeline” (on the left side) (b). Change the Width to 600 and the Height to 800 (c).

(a)

(b)

(c)

6. You’ll probably notice that our images got stretched. We’re going to follow the spirit of HFC# and change it to be an unstretched size. Select the Image from your Objects and Timeline and set Stretch to None, HorizontalAlignment to Left and VerticalAlignment to Right.

7. Before we run the project, let’s change the background so we can tell where our page is. Select the LayoutRoot and change the Background to something not white (I chose a light blue). Save All in Blend and click on your open Visual Studio 2008 and hit F5. (I haven’t had a lot of luck getting Silverlight projects to run from Blend)

OK, that gets us to page 14. The next step is to add extra code to the auto-generated code in Visual Studio.

8. Go back to Blend and click on the Image and go to the Events section (the little lighting icon) of the Properties tab. This will give you a list of all the events available for the Image control.

9. In MouseLeftButtonUp, type the name of the method you want called when the Image registers a MouseLeftButtonUp event (I typed ImageClick) and hit enter.

10. Blend will communicate to Visual Studio, which will in turn auto-generate all the code you need for that event handler. It should look something like this:

private void ImageClick(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e)

{

}

11. Type the following at the top of the page:

using System.Windows.Browser;

and then type the following into the ImageClick method:

HtmlPage.Window.Alert(“Contact List 1.0. \nWritten by: Your Name”);

Run your project.

From here, HFC# walks through creating a database. The next installment will pick up after the database is created and we get to bind the data to our interface.

Download Project Files for this post: HFCSharp Part 1 Project Files

Several months back, I was doing some work for a company that was using WPF for a stylus based application. One of the things that they found they needed was a scrollbar that could be used by left handed people who would have to cover the entire screen with their left hand in order to scroll a traditional scroll viewer.

The solution ended up being so easy in WPF that I thought I’d post it here.

I’m in a two-birds-one-stone mood, so we’ll do this for both the listview, which will also cover a more traditional scrollviewer. Let’s start with our ever friendly listview.

At the very sight of this thing, with a stylus in hand, your average lefty is thinking to him or herself “I wonder if I can do my work upside down?” Let’s show them that we love and accept them just as they are.

The first thing we’re going to do is create a new template for this sucker, so right click on your listview and go to “Edit Control Parts (Template) -> Edit a Copy…”

Now we’re looking at the standard listview template. Mine looks like this:

Let’s dig right into the ScrollViewer. If you’re doing this from the listview (like I am) then creating a template for the listview has already created a template for the scrollviewer. If you’re starting from a basic scrollviewer, you can pretty much start right here.

For the purposes of making this thing easy to work with in Blend, go ahead and set the HorizontalScrollBarVisibility and VerticalScrollBarVisibility to Visible.

And then “Edit Control Parts (Template) -> Edit a Copy…” (or “Edit Control Parts (Template) -> Edit Template” if it is available).

We are now looking at the guts of the ScrollViewer Control.

ListView ScrollViewer will look like this:

The normal ScrollViewer will look like this:

For our purposes, they’re functionally the same. It is actually a fairly simple control… basically just a Grid panel with the columns and rows set up like so:

<Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
      <ColumnDefinition Width=”*“/>
      <ColumnDefinition Width=”Auto“/>
</Grid.ColumnDefinitions>

<Grid.RowDefinitions>
      <RowDefinition Height=”*“/>
      <RowDefinition Height=”Auto“/>
</Grid.RowDefinitions>

The scrollBars are set up so that their visibility is tied to (duh) the visibility that is set on the control. But what this does is it means that when they are collapsed… they Grid reclaims the space that they were taking up.

Now… here’s the hilarious part… in order to make this ScrollViewer left handed, all you have to do is swap the Grid.Columns:

<Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
      <ColumnDefinition Width=”Auto“/>
      <ColumnDefinition Width=”*“/>
</Grid.ColumnDefinitions>

You’ve now switched the columns so that the left handed column is auto. Here’s a list of the Grid.Column realignments you’ll need to make:

Change Column to “1″:

• PART_HorizontalScrollBar
• All DockPanels (ListView only)
• PART_ScrollContentPresenter (ScrollViewer only)
• Corner (ScrollViewer only)

Change Column to “0″:

• PART_VerticalScrollBar

Basically, swap everything from in the two columns.

Done.

If you want to make this a more robust control, I recommend creating a ScrollViewer with an additional dependency property (IsSouthPaw or something). Make it so that your Grid has three columns:

<Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
      <ColumnDefinition Width=”Auto“/>
      <ColumnDefinition Width=”*“/>
      <ColumnDefinition Width=”Auto“/>
</Grid.ColumnDefinitions>

And then you can just create a trigger that swaps the column placement of your PART_VerticalScrollBar. Such a trigger will look something like this. And by “something”, I mean “exactly”.

<Trigger Property=”IsSouthPaw” Value=”True“>
      <Setter Property=”Grid.Column” TargetName=”PART_VerticalScrollBar“  Value=”0” />
</Trigger>

Go forth and make Ned Flanders proud.

By the way, I listen to pop punk whenever I write my tutorials and I just thought I should let Senses Fail know that they can probably get away with about 80% less “dying cat” screaming and still put out good music. You know… because they’re probably WPF programmers on the side and they’ll probably read this to solve all their left-handed scrollbar needs.

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)’ »

So… you’ve got your listview and you want your items to look a certain way. In this post, we’ll look at changing as many things as we can inside the ListView ItemContainerStyle.

 First things first… getting to the ItemContainerStyle using Blend. With the ListView selected, go to the top menu and click:

 Edit Other Styles -> Edit ItemContainerStyle -> Create Empty…

Name your Style and you get tossed into Style editing. Here, you can do all sorts of great things, like… um… changing the background or something.

Continue reading ‘Styling ListView Items Using Blend’ »

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?’ »