Rénald's Blog - Saturday, July 11, 2009

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio : where is my preview ?

If you try the new Silverlight 3 tools for Visual Studio 2008, you should be frustrated (or happy?) while not finding anymore your Silverlight preview.

This one is just… hidden! J

If you go to the bottom of the XAML page, you can drap up the XAML page and you'll discover the designer.

Accordingly to this message on the Tim Heuer's blog, it should be more than just hidden:

Where did my design view go?! You may notice right away that the VS tools no longer have the preview mode for your XAML in Silverlight projects. This is by design. We heard some pretty vocal feedback that the preview was usually turned off for most development because it was not turning out to be helpful as the applications got more complex. The team decided put the resource investment into creating a great editable design surface in VS2010 instead and not delay the release of Silverlight 3.

See you later!

Silverlight 3.0 | Visual Studio 2008

Saturday, July 11, 2009 9:50:12 PM (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)

Rénald Nollet | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | Trackback

First look at Blend 3.0 RC : a simple example of the HyperlinkAction behavior

Blend 3.0 RC is there and it's pretty exciting to play with this new tool.

Things changed between the March preview and this RC version.

Let's play with a first very simple sample of what we can now do…

Blend 3.0 has a new useful asset library: http://blogs.msdn.com/unnir/archive/2009/05/22/the-blend-3-asset-library.aspx

In my sample, I'll just deal with an image and a textbox :

If I go into my assets library, I can find a behaviors category. That's the place where we'll be able to use all the behaviors available in the assemblies referenced for a project.

If I take the HyperlinkAction behavior and drop it on my picture in the designer, I can see the properties of my behavior.

The Trigger gives information about who can fire which event. The SourceName value [Parent] means here that the event is fired by the picture.

With the piker , you can choose any other element in your artboard.

The type of event is here a MouseLeftButtonDown but many other events may be chosen from the dropdown.

The common properties indicates here where to navigate and in which target window.

Here is the resulting XAML of my picture and HyperlinkAction :

With just 0 line of code and without Visual Studio, I can create links on any Silverlight element using this HyperlinkAction!

See you later!

Blend 3.0

Saturday, July 11, 2009 6:06:08 PM (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)

Rénald Nollet | Disclaimer | Comments [1] | Trackback

Monday, April 28, 2008

Silverlight dynamic charts with Visifire components

Some weeks ago, I saw that Visifire (http://www.visifire.com/) was working on chart open source components for Silverlight 2 (currently in beta 1).

Here is a snapshot of a small Silverlight 2 beta 1 application I wrote with this components :

You can change the values in the textboxes and refresh the charts when clicking on the button.

You can test it there : http://www.renaldnollet.com/blogsamples/silverlightcharts1/testpage.html

This sample is easily done. Here is my XAML file :

<UserControl x:Class="SilverLightTests.SilverlightControl5"

xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007"

xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"

Width="615" Height="483" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d">

Grid>

UserControl>

And here is my code-behind :

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Windows;

using System.Windows.Controls;

using System.Windows.Documents;

using System.Windows.Input;

using System.Windows.Media;

using System.Windows.Media.Animation;

using System.Windows.Shapes;

namespace SilverLightTests

{

public partial class SilverlightControl5 : UserControl

{

public SilverlightControl5()

{

InitializeComponent();

this.Loaded += new RoutedEventHandler(Page_Loaded);

this.MyButton.Click += new RoutedEventHandler(MyButton_Click);

}

void MyButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

{

CreateChart();

}

void Page_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

{

CreateChart();

}

public void CreateChart()

{

Visifire.Charts.Chart visiChart = new Visifire.Charts.Chart();

Visifire.Charts.DataSeries dataSeries = new Visifire.Charts.DataSeries();

Visifire.Charts.DataPoint dataPoint;

visiChart.AnimationType = "Type4";

Visifire.Charts.Title title = new Visifire.Charts.Title();

title.Text = "";

visiChart.Children.Add(title);

visiChart.Width = 300;

visiChart.Height = 300;

Random rand = new Random(DateTime.Now.Millisecond);

for (int i = 1; i < 9; i++)

{

dataPoint = new Visifire.Charts.DataPoint();

TextBox tb = (TextBox)this.LayoutRoot.Children[i];

dataPoint.YValue = System.Convert.ToDouble(tb.Text);

dataPoint.LegendText = tb.Name;

dataSeries.Children.Add(dataPoint);

}

dataSeries.RenderAs = "Pie";

visiChart.Children.Add(dataSeries);

MyCanvas.Children.Clear();

MyCanvas.Children.Add(visiChart);

Visifire.Charts.Chart visiChart2 = new Visifire.Charts.Chart();

visiChart2.AnimationType = "Type4";

visiChart2.Width = 300;

visiChart2.Height = 300;

dataSeries = new Visifire.Charts.DataSeries();

for (int i = 1; i <9; i++)

{

dataPoint = new Visifire.Charts.DataPoint();

TextBox tb = (TextBox)this.LayoutRoot.Children[i];

dataPoint.YValue = System.Convert.ToDouble(tb.Text);

dataSeries.Children.Add(dataPoint);

}

dataSeries.RenderAs = "Column";

visiChart2.Children.Add(dataSeries);

MyCanvas2.Children.Clear();

MyCanvas2.Children.Add(visiChart2);

}

Silverlight 2.0

Monday, April 28, 2008 5:31:46 PM (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)

Rénald Nollet | Disclaimer | Comments [1] | Trackback

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Visual Studio 2005 and the Load method of UserControl

Maybe you already met this kind of problems with UserControl and Visual Studio 2005 : you design a main winform without any problems, you design a user control without any problem. But then when you add the user control to the main form, the designer will encouter an error on the main form. You nevertheless may run the application without any problem.

The reason for this is that the designer is calling the load method of user controls when you open the form that is hosting those user controls.

A simple test :

Here is the designer part of my user control (an empty one with just one label, this is enough to demonstrate our problem):

Here is the code behind :

The important thing there is the Load method.

Then, if I want to add the user control to a main empty form, here is what you will see :

Most of the time, this is not annoying, but sometimes, this may lead to the impossibility to woon the main form with the designer (because you are in design time and not run time, information may not be available):

You can then work with the DesignTime property of the user control :

.NET 2.0 | Visual Studio 2005

Tuesday, November 13, 2007 6:26:00 PM (Romance Standard Time, UTC+01:00)

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Thursday, September 20, 2007

Attribute, bitwise operations and enumerations : the FontStyle example

Recently, one of my clients was borred about a customisation of a .NET 2.0 RichTextBox control.

He was using a ToolStrip to change the style of text selections :

The problem he met was about the toggling between the different styles.

If you take a look at the FontStyle enumeration, you'll see that it "has a FlagsAttribute attribute that allows a bitwise combination of its member values" (cfr MSDN).

Knowing that, the values correlated to the different FontStyle are :

Regular : 0 (binary representation : 0000)
Bold : 1 (binary representation : 0001)
Italic : 2 (binary representation : 0010)
Underline : 4 (binary representation : 0100)
Strikeout : 8 (binary representation : 1000)

The fact that enumeration constants are defined in power of 2 is of required by the FlagsAttribute to avoid overlaps of different combinations.

Imagine that the selected text in the RichTextBox is bold and underlined. You'll get a FontStyle constant of 5 (binary representation : 0101).

If you ask to remove the bold style, you'll then just have to apply a XOR operator :

0101 XOR 0001 = 0100

If you then want to toggle again :

0100 XOR 0001 = 0101

The code in C# will thus be something like (rtb is the reference to the RichTextBox):

Font f = new Font(this.rtb.Font.FontFamily, this.rtb.Font.Size, this.rtb.SelectionFont.Style ^ FontStyle.Bold);
this.rtb.SelectionFont = f;

Easy, isn't it? :)

This will of course apply to all the enumeration types that have the FlagsAttribute.

.NET 2.0

Thursday, September 20, 2007 5:12:00 PM (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)

Rénald Nollet | Disclaimer | Comments [0] | Trackback

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