One of the nifty little tricks I got working in my attempt to update my Silverlight Color Picker was that I wanted to have the entire content of a TextBox… Read More »Getting a MouseLeftButtonDown or MouseLeftButtonUp Event From Your TextBox
Mac Scroller Project Files Updated for RCW Just because we’re working in Microsoft technologies doesn’t mean we can’t throw a bone to our Mac friends. After all, they are the… Read More »Styling a Silverlight ScrollViewer (to Look Like a Mac ScrollViewer)
I’ve recently be working on changing the ControlTemplate of a GridViewColumnHeader in a custom ListView that we’ve been working on. (The ListView was rewritten for sorting, so that’s why it… Read More »Tip For Finding Resources for a Control in generic.xaml
This is just a quick note on creating a ListView style with the appropriate GridView style and template assignments. Normally, I’ve been creating listviews that look like this: <ListView x:Name=”MyListView”… Read More »How to Assign ColumnHeaderContainerStyle and ColumnHeaderTemplate to a ListView Style
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 is a post that has taken months to complete, but addresses something that I don’t think I’ve seen sufficiently covered for anyone who is new to WPF. Resultantly, we’re… Read More »WPF Designers Guide to Styles And Templates
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.
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.
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… Read More »Making Visual Studio 2008 Only Show XAML