WPF

Designers Guide to Debugging WPF Applications with Snoop

by Matthias Shapiro
WPF

UPDATE: The makers of Snoop have made an installer that makes this post obsolete. Go get it… it’s well updated and worth it. Download the super-simple Snoop files. (Just extract… Read More »Designers Guide to Debugging WPF Applications with Snoop

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

How Do I Set Up Grid Lines for my ListView?

by Matthias Shapiro
How To..., listview, XAML

So you want grid lines in your listview, huh? Something that looks a little like this?

OK, we can do this the easy way and the hard way.
Read More »How Do I Set Up Grid Lines for my ListView?

Getting the Popup to Close When It Loses Focus

by Matthias Shapiro
focus, Popup, WPF, XAML

On a recent project, I spent (I kid you not) over three hours trying to get a stinking popup to close when I clicked somewhere else in the application. Figuring… Read More »Getting the Popup to Close When It Loses Focus

The WPF Designer Guide To Styling the (your-favorite-adjectival-swear-word-here) ListView

by Matthias Shapiro
Blend, listview, WPF, WPF Designer Guides, XAML

So, after months of delay I finally figured that there are probably some people out there who want to figure out how to make the WPF listview look the way they want it to look.

A quick note: I will be dealing almost entirely with the listview look. If you want the listview to do something (functionality) or look a certain way and you can’t find the answer here, leave a comment with your suggestion and I’ll try to blog about it and place a link to the answer in my listview FAQ.

My goal is to create a significant repository on getting the stinking listview to look the way you want and do what you want it to do.

You’re probably here because, compared with most of the WPF controls, Blend gives very little guidance on how to deal with the listview (even though you use the listview for practically everything you do). So we’re going to start with the basic structure of the listview. This is what the basic listview looks like in the XAML.

So this post will start out giving basic guidance on what to edit when you’re trying to edit the various parts of the listview. I will update these sections with links and tutorials on listview specific tasks as time goes on.

Announcing Designer WPF

This is a blog dedicated to WPF guidance for designers. The reason I’m creating this blog is because there seems to be almost nothing out there in helping designers to really… Read More »Announcing Designer WPF