November, 2007

Acropolis – where has it gone?

It looks like Acropolis has been folded into the core .net framework If you look at the blogs of the Acropolis team, that much is clear. Whether it will feature, and when will be a totally different question however! Let's hope it is soon - before VS2010 out of preference. What can we do in...

Acropolis – aka MVC

Let's go back in time.... Back to the dark ages of IT Somebody, I'm not sure who, invented a mechanism called MVC [model view controller] and life was good. It did seriously help with the early nightmares in the object orientated world. For most of us, that meant C++ :-) It separated out the...

Settings – adding custom class

Have you ever wondered how you enter custom classes into the new vs2005 (and vs2008) settings editor? Or like me, desperately tried to do so and couldn't the information anywhere. A little information as to what I'm blathering about. In the VS2005/VS2008 settings editor, you can specify the...

Items Control – useful tip

When you are updating the items or the collection pointed to by ItemsSource on an ItemsControl (or ListBox or ListView), do you wish you could SuspendLayout and ResumeLayout, like in Windows Forms days? Well, you can! What you need to do is call DeferRefresh, like...

Missing controls

I believe there are a number of missing controls from WPF as of November 2007, despite the RTM of Visual Studio 2008, by comparison with Windows Forms v2.

• NumericUpDown (aka Spinner) - is a serious omission as it's not simple to replicate
• DomainUpDown - is also a serious...

ListView – is it really too slow?

I have seen a number of blog entries along the lines of 'ListView is too slow', or 'WPF is too slow', or the worst one of all 'ListView has performance issues'. Obviously none of them mention any details, nor elaborate on what issues there might be - sounds a bit like an old project manager of...

ListBox – multi column example

A listbox can easily be used as a multi-column list in WPF. To do that, you need firstly, a listbox: <Listbox x:Name="lbFields" IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem="True" ItemsSource="{Binding Path=blah}" > Then, you need to define a couple of templates, one for...

ListBox – the forgotten control

How did that happen? I personally think it happened because when we were all looking at WPF to begin with (in CTP days), it was very obvious that there was no Grid. Then, because of that people noticed that the ListView control had the option to specify a grid version as one of it's views. That...

Acropolis – sections

There are a number of different elements to an Acropolis application, and they are:

part view

What you see! The user interface portion, and they are sometimes referred to as skins. In the MVC world they were called views.

part

In...

Drag and drop – checking mouse button

If you are doing drag and drop by hand (rather than using Josh Smith's excellent DragAndDropManager - http://www.codeproject.com/WPF/ListViewDragDropManager.asp) for whatever reason, one thing to be careful is to to allow...