Last night I submitted my MIX 10K Challenge piece, so I’m just killing time while I wait for it to get accepted. Please keep me in mind if you plan… Read More »Mask Animations (Clipping Path Animations) In Silverlight Without a Line of Code
Seeing as how I’ve already spent far too much time on this little project, barring major problems with this control (please point them out!) this will probably be my last… Read More »Final-ish Silverlight Color Picker Utility
Download code for this sample (updated for RCW) I was reading Mike Snow’s blog and he had a recent Silverlight tutorial on creating a Zooming toolbar. I looked at it… Read More »Create a Zooming Button Style In Silverlight Without Code
I recently got a comment asking if I could do something on creating a Blend-type ScollViewer styling. The only problem is that the ScrollViewer is a multi-post affair, which I’ll… Read More »Styling the ScrollViewer
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… Read More »Head First C#: Silverlight Supplement For Chapter 1 (pages 8-16)
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… Read More »How Do I Make a ListView or a ScrollViewer Left Handed?
This tutorial derives from the general “How to Style the ComboBox” set of tutorials. First let’s make sure you’re in the right place. In this tutorial, we’re going to style… Read More »Styling the ComboBox Dropdown (popup)
One of the questions I get most often from designers and almost never from developers is:
How can I get drop shadows into my application without killing my performance?
It is, of course, easy as punch and pie to get drop shadows into your application. You can just use the Bitmaps Effects panel in the Appearance section:
For the love of God, please do not use the Bitmap Effects in the Appearance section!
If any developers found out that I told you to use BitmapEffects, they would hunt me down and cut off my fingers. This is because, while the Bitmap Effects in WPF are all sorts of cool, they make your computer break down into uncontrollable sobbing. Bitmap Effects hog system resources by requiring software rendering for render-heavy effects. There is no better way to slow down a perfectly good application than to give every other element a drop shadow.
But, what if you really really want to?
This is actually a continuation of my post on getting the ComboBox items to accept text wrapping, so I’ll be working from that point forward. If you’re coming fresh into this, you won’t be missing anything… but that is my explaination for the pictures containing wrapping text.
When last we left our heroes, we has a couple problems. The first was that our items were either black text on a white background and ran together in a very un-designer-y way.
The second was that the selected item background makes your eyes bleed such a horrid blue color you’ll feel like Paul Atreides staring at a stone burner.
Was that a little too geek? My apologies.
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.
Read More »How Do I Wrap Text (or Add TextEllipsis) In The ComboBox?