Blend

Embedded ListView Columns (Columns Within Columns)

by Matthias Shapiro
Advanced Tutorial, Blend, How To..., listview, Tutorial, WPF, XAML

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:

EmbeddedWireframe

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).Read More »Embedded ListView Columns (Columns Within Columns)

Styling ListView Items Using Blend

by Matthias Shapiro
Blend, How To..., listview, WPF

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…

ItemContainerStyleMenu

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.

How Do I Center Something In My ListView Column?

by Matthias Shapiro
Blend, listview, WPF, XAML

So the items in your ListView column look like this:

Centered Example 1

And you want them to look like this:

Centered Example 2

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

How do I connect an RSS Feed to my ListView/ListBox/Whatever?

by Matthias Shapiro
Blend, How To..., WPF

When I’m doing the initial design for a project (while the developers are working on silly things like data validation and security), I often find myself in need of data so that I can see my project in action. The developers, of course, have no interest in conjuring up test data at that phase in the project, so I started using RSS feeds as data sources for my initial designs.

Not all RSS feeds are equal in the eyes of Blend. I use one of the New York Times RSS feeds, which always work flawlessly.

So we’re looking at the listview/listbox/whatever in our project. Right click on it (in the composition or in the Objects and Timeline pane, it doesn’t matter) and select the “Bind ItemsSource to Data”.

ItemSourceMenu