WPF Development Tools

Microsoft provides two development tools for WPF applications. One is Visual Studio, made for developers and the other is Expression Blend made for designers. While Visual Studio is good in code and XAML editing, it has a rare support for all the graphical stuff like gradients, template editing, animation, etc. This is the point where Expression Blend comes in. Blend covers the graphical part very well but it has (still) rare support for code and XAML editing. So the conclusion is that you will need both of them.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio is the tool for developers to develop WPF applications. It includes a graphical designer for WPF since version 2008. If you're using Visual Studio 2005 you can install an add-on that enables you to develop WPF applications. Microsoft provides a free Express Edition of Visual Studio that also includes the WPF designer. You can download it from the following URL
Download Microsoft Visual C# 2010 - Express Edition

Microsoft Expression Blend 3 + Sketch Flow

Expression Blend is the tool for designers. It's part of the Expression Studio, a new tool suite from Microsoft especially created for user experience designers. Blend covers all the missing features of the Visual Studio designer like styling, templating, animations, 3D graphics, resources and gradients. In the latest Version it also includes a powerful prototyping tool called SketchFlow. Expression Blend can open solution files created by visual studio.

Download Microsoft Expression Blend 3

Other useful tools

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WPF Inspector Snoop (Inspect the Visual Tree of running WPF applications) Mole (Data Visualizer for Visual Studio XAML Power Toys WPF Performance Suite

Introduction to Windows Presentation Foundation

Overview
The Windows Presentation Foundation is Microsofts next generation UI framework to create applications with a rich user experience. It is part of the .NET framework 3.0 and higher. WPF combines application UIs, 2D graphics, 3D graphics, documents and multimedia into one single framework. Its vector based rendering engine uses hardware acceleration of modern graphic cards. This makes the UI faster, scalable and resolution independent. The followinig illustration gives you an overview of the main new features of WPF

Separation of Appearance and Behavior

WPF separates the appearance of an user interface from its behavior. The appearance is generally specified in the Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML), the behavior is implemented in a managed programming language like C# or Visual Basic. The two parts are tied together by databinding, events and commands. The separation of appearance and behavior brings the following benefits:
Appearance and behaviour are loosely coupled Designers and developers can work on separate models. Graphical design tools can work on simple XML documents instead of parsing code.

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Rich composition

Controls in WPF are extremely composable. You can define almost any type of controls as content of another. Although these flexibility sounds horrible to designers, its a very powerful feature if you use it appropriate. Put an image into a button to create an image button, or put a list of videos into a combobox to choose a video file.

<Button> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <Image Source="speaker.png" Stretch="Uniform"/> <TextBlock Text="Play Sound" /> </StackPanel> </Button>

Highly customizable
Because of the strict separation of appearance and behavior you can easily change the look of a control. The concept ofstyles let you skin controls almost like CSS in HTML. Templates let you replace the entire appearance of a control. The following example shows an default WPF button and a customized button.

Resolution independence
All measures in WPF are logical units - not pixels. A logical unit is a 1/96 of an inch. If you increase the resolution of your screen, the user interface stays the same size - if just gets crispier. Since WPF builds on a vector based rendering engine it's incredibly easy to build scaleable user interfaces.

How to create a simple WPF application

In Visual Studio 2008
Open Visual Studio 2008 and choose "File", "New", "Project..." in the main menu. Choose "WPF Application" as project type. Choose a folder for your project and give it a name. Then press "OK"

Visual Studio creates the project and automatically adds some files to the solution. A Window1.xaml and an App.xaml. The structure looks quite similar to WinForms, except that the Window1.designer.cs file is no longer code but it's now declared in XAML as Window1.xaml

Open the Window1.xaml file in the WPF designer and drag a Button and a TextBox from the toolbox to the Window

Select the Button and switch to the event view in the properties window (click on the little yellow lightning icon). Doubleclick on the "Click" event to create a method in the codebehind that is called, when the user clicks on the button. Note: If you do not find a yellow lightning icon, you need to install the Service Pack 1 for VisualStudio on your machine. Alternatively you can doubleclick on the button in the designer to achieve the same result.

Visual Studio automatically creates a method in the code-behind file that gets called when the button is clicked.
private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { textBox1.Text = "Hello WPF!"; }

The textbox has automatically become assigned the name textBox1 by the WPF designer. Set text Text to "Hello WPF!" when the button gets clicked and we are done! Start the application by hit [F5] on your keyboard.

Isn't this cool!

User Experience Design Process

User Experience becomes a Key Success Factor
In the past, we focused mainly on building products that fulfilled the functional requirements of the user. User experience was often considered late in the development process. But today the customer demands more than just a working product. Providing the right features is still the prerequisite for a good product, but to turn it into something extraordinary you need to provide a good user experience! Providing a rich user experience is not a thing of fortune. It needs to be planed, designed and integrated into the development of a product. Designing a rich user experience is not only about make up your user interface by some graphics and gradients - its a much broader concept. Its about creating an emotional connection between the user and your software. It makes the user feel good and so he likes to continue using the software.

New Tools for Designers

Microsoft recognized, give development teams the power to create rich user experiences it needs a lot more graphical tool support than VisualStudio can provide today. So they decided to create a new tool suite - made for designers.

This tool suite is called Microsoft Expression. It consists of the four products:
Expression Blend is built to create user interfaces in WPF and Silverlight. It builds the bridge between designer and developers. It can open VisualStudio solutions

Expression Design is a leightweight version of Adobe Illustrator to create and edit vector graphics.

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Expression Media is built to encode, cut and enrich video files and optimize them for silverlight streaming Expression Web is Microsoft next generation of HTML and Javascript editor. Its the replacement for Frontpage.

Together they are a powerful package. The following illustration shows a sample workflow of integrating a vector image that is created by a graphics designer in Adobe Illustrator into a WPF project that is part of a VisualStudio solution.

Development Workflow of a WPF Project

Developing a WPF application with a rich user experience requires a lot more skills than just a requirements analyst that defines a list of use cases and developer that implements the software. You have to find out what the user really needs. This can be done by following a user centered approach.

1. Elicit Requirements
Like in any kind of software projects its important to know and focus the target of your development. You should talk to stakeholders and users to find out the real needs. These needs should be refined to features and expressed in use cases (abstract) or user scenarios (illustrative). Priorize the tasks by risk and importance and work iteratively. This work is done by the role of the requirements engineer.

2. Create and Validate UI Prototype

Creating a user interface prototype is an important step to share ideas between users and engineers to create a common understanding of the interaction design. This task is typically done by an interaction designer. It's helpful to only sketch the user interface in a rough way to prevent early discussions about design details. There are multiple techniques and tools to do this. Some of them are:
Paper prototype Use paper and pencil to draw rough sketches of your user interface. No tools and infrastructure is needed. Everyone can just scribble thier ideas on the paper.

Wireframes Wireframes are often used to sketch the layout of a page. It's called wireframes because you just draw the outlines of controls and images. This can be done with tools like PowerPoint or Visio

Expression Blend 3 - Sketch Flow Sketch flow is a new cool feature to create interactive prototypes directly in WPF. You can use the integrated "wiggly style" to make it look sketchy. The prototype can be run in a standalone player that has an integrated feedback mechanism.

Interactive Prototype The most expensive and real approach is to create an (reusable) interactive prototype that works as the real application but with dummy data.

It is strongly recommended to test your UI prototype on real users. This helps you to find out and address design problems early in the development process. The following techniques are very popular to evaluate UI prototypes:

Walktrough A walktrough is usually done early in a project with wireframes or paper prototypes. The user gets a task to solve and he controlls the prototype by touching on the paper. The test leader than presents a new paper showing the state after the interaction.

Usability Lab To do a usability lab, you need a computer with a screen capture software and a camera. The proband gets an task to do and the requirements and interaction engineer watch him doing this. They should not talk to him to find out where he gets stuck and why.

3. Implement Business Logic and Raw User Interface 4. Integrate Graphical Design 5. Test software

Roles
Buliding a modern user interface with a rich user experience requires additional skills from your development team. These skills are described as roles that can be distributed among peoples in your development team.
Developer The developer is responsible to implement the functionality of the application. He creates the data model, implements the business logic and wires all up to a simple view.

Graphical Designer The graphical designer is responsible to create a graphical concept and build graphical assets like icons,logos, 3D models or color schemes. If the graphical designer is familiar with Microsoft Expression tools he directly creates styles and control templates.

Interaction Designer The interaction designer is responsible for the content and the flow of a user interface. He creates wireframes or UI sketches to share its ideas with the team or customer. He should validate his work by doing walktroughs or storyboards.

Integrator The integrator is the artist between the designer and the developer world. He takes the assets of the graphical designer and integrates them into the raw user interface of the developer. This role needs a rare set of skills and so it's often hard to find the right person for it.

More Infos
The New Iteration - Microsoft Paper about the Designer/Developer collaboration

Introduction to XAML
XAML stands for Extensible Application Markup Language. Its a simple language based on XML to create and initialize .NET objects with hierarchical relations. Altough it was originally invented for WPF it can by used to create any kind of object trees. Today XAML is used to create user interfaces in WPF, Silverlight, declare workflows in WF and for electronic paper in the XPS standard. All classes in WPF have parameterless constructors and make excessive usage of properties. That is done to make it perfectly fit for XML languages like XAML.

Advantages of XAML
All you can do in XAML can also be done in code. XAML ist just another way to create and initialize objects. You can use WPF without using XAML. It's up to you if you want to declare it in XAML or write it in code. Declare your UI in XAML has some advantages:
XAML code is short and clear to read Separation of designer code and logic Graphical design tools like Expression Blend require XAML as source. The separation of XAML and UI logic allows it to clearly separate the roles of designer and developer.

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XAML vs. Code

As an example we build a simple StackPanel with a textblock and a button in XAML and compare it to the same code in C#.
<StackPanel> <TextBlock Margin="20">Welcome to the World of XAML</TextBlock> <Button Margin="10" HorizontalAlignment="Right">OK</Button> </StackPanel>

The same expressed in C# will look like this:

// Create the StackPanel StackPanel stackPanel = new StackPanel(); this.Content = stackPanel; // Create the TextBlock TextBlock textBlock = new TextBlock();

textBlock.Margin = new Thickness(10); textBlock.Text = "Welcome to the World of XAML"; stackPanel.Children.Add(textBlock); // Create the Button Button button = new Button(); button.Margin= new Thickness(20); button.Content = "OK"; stackPanel.Children.Add(button);

As you can see is the XAML version much shorter and clearer to read. And that's the power of XAMLs expressiveness.

Properties as Elements
Properties are normally written inline as known from XML <Button Content="OK" />. But what if we want to put a more complex object as content like an image that has properties itself or maybe a whole grid panel? To do that we can use the property element syntax. This allows us to extract the property as an own chlild element.
<Button> <Button.Content> <Image Source="Images/OK.png" Width="50" Height="50" /> </Button.Content> </Button>

Implicit Type conversion

A very powerful construct of WPF are implicit type converters. They do their work silently in the background. When you declare a BorderBrush, the word "Blue" is only a string. The implicit BrushConverter makes aSystem.Windows.Media.Brushes.Blue out of it. The same regards to the border thickness that is beeing converted implicit into a Thickness object. WPF includes a lot of type converters for built-in classes, but you can also write type converters for your own classses.
<Border BorderBrush="Blue" BorderThickness="0,10"> </Border>

Markup Extensions

Markup extensions are dynamic placeholders for attribute values in XAML. They resolve the value of a property at runtime. Markup extensions are surrouded by curly braces (Example: Background="{StaticResource NormalBackgroundBrush}"). WPF has some built-in markup extensions, but you can write your own, by deriving fromMarkupExtension. These are the builtin markup extensions:
Binding To bind the values of two properties together.

StaticResource One time lookup of a resource entry

DynamicResource Auto updating lookup of a resource entry

TemplateBinding To bind a property of a control template to a dependency property of the control

x:Static Resolve the value of a static property.

x:Null Return null

The first identifier within a pair of curly braces is the name of the extension. All preciding identifiers are named parameters in the form of Property=Value. The following example shows a label whose Content is bound to the Text of the textbox. When you type a text into the text box, the text property changes and the binding markup extension automatically updates the content of the label. <TextBox x:Name="textBox"/> <Label Content="{Binding Text, ElementName=textBox}"/>

Namespaces
At the beginning of every XAML file you need to include two namespaces. The first is http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation. It is mapped to all wpf controls inSystem.Windows.Controls. The second is http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml it is mapped to System.Windows.Markup that defines the XAML keywords. The mapping between an XML namespace and a CLR namespace is done by the XmlnsDefinition attribute at assembly level. You can also directly include a CLR namespace in XAML by using the clr-namespace: prefix.

<Window xmlns=http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation xmlns:x=http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml> </Window>

Logical- and Visual Tree

Introduction
Elements of a WPF user interface are hierarchically related. This relation is called the LogicalTree. The template of one element consists of multiple visual elements. This tree is called the VisualTree. WPF differs between those two trees, because for some problems you only need the logical elements and for other problems you want all elements.
<Window> <Grid> <Label Content="Label" /> <Button Content="Button" /> </Grid> </Window>

Why do we need two different kind of trees?

A WPF control consists of multiple, more primitive controls. A button - for example - consists of a border, a rectangle and a content presenter. These controls are visual children of the button. When WPF renders the button, the element itself has no appearance, but it iterates through the visual tree

and renders the visual children of it. This hierarchical relation can also be used to do hit-testing, layout etc. But sometimes you are not interested in the borders and rectangles of a controls' template. Particulary because the template can be replaced, and so you should not relate on the visual tree structure! Because of that you want a more robust tree that only contains the "real" controls - and not all the template parts. And that is the eligibility for the logical tree.

The Logical Tree

The logical tree describes the relations between elements of the user interface. The logical tree is responsible for:
Inherit DependencyProperty values Resolving DynamicResources references Looking up element names for bindings Forwaring RoutedEvents

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The Visual Tree

The visual tree contains all logical elements including all visual elements of the template of each element.<br The visual tree is responsible for:

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Rendering visual elements Propagate element opacity Propagate Layout- and RenderTransforms Propagate the IsEnabled property. Do Hit-Testing RelativeSource (FindAncestor)

Programmatically Find an Ancestor in the Visual Tree

If you are a child element of a user interface and you want to access data from a parent element, but you don't know how many levels up that elemens is, it's the best solution to navigate up the tree until it finds an element of the requested type. This helper does excactly this. You can use almost the same code to navigate through the logical tree.
public static class VisualTreeHelperExtensions { public static T FindAncestor<T>(DependencyObject dependencyObject)

where T : class { DependencyObject target = dependencyObject; do { target = VisualTreeHelper.GetParent(target); } while (target != null && !(target is T)); return target as T; } }

The following example shows how to use the helper. It starts at this and navigates up the visual tree until it finds an element of type Grid. If the helper reaches the root element of the tree, it returns null.
var grid = VisualTreeHelperExtensions.FindAncestor<Grid>(this);

Dependency Properties
Introduction Value resolution strategy The magic behind it How to create a DepdencyProperty Readonly DependencyProperties Attached DependencyProperties Listen to dependency property changes How to clear a local value

Introduction
When you begin to develop appliations with WPF, you will soon stumble across DependencyProperties. They look quite similar to normal .NET properties, but the concept behind is much more complex and powerful. The main difference is, that the value of a normal .NET property is read directly from a private member in your class, whereas the value of a DependencyProperty is resolved dynamically when calling the GetValue() method that is inherited from DependencyObject. When you set a value of a dependency property it is not stored in a field of your object, but in a dictionary of keys and values provided by the base class DependencyObject. The key of an entry is the name of the property and the value is the value you want to set. The advantages of dependency properties are
Reduced memory footprint It's a huge dissipation to store a field for each property when you think that over 90% of the properties of a UI control typically stay at its initial values. Dependency properties solve these problems by only store modified properties in the instance. The default values are stored once within the dependency property. Value inheritance When you access a dependency property the value is resolved by using a value resolution strategy. If no local value is set, the dependency property navigates up the logical tree until it finds a value. When you set the FontSize on the root element it applies to all textblocks below except you override the value.

Change notification Dependency properties have a built-in change notification mechanism. By registering a callback in the property metadata you get notified, when the value of the property has been changed. This is also used by the databinding.

Value resolution strategy

Every time you access a dependency property, it internally resolves the value by following the precedence from high to low. It checks if a local value is available, if not if a custom style trigger is active,... and continues until it founds a value. At last the default value is always available.

The magic behind it

Each WPF control registers a set of DependencyProperties to the static DependencyProperty class. Each of them consists of a key - that must be unique per type - and a metadata that contain callbacks and a default value. All types that want to use DependencyProperties must derive from DependencyObject. This baseclass defines a key, value dictionary that contains local values of dependency properties. The key of

an entry is the key defined with the dependency property. When you access a dependency property over its .NET property wrapper, it internally callsGetValue(DependencyProperty) to access the value. This method resolves the value by using a value resolution strategy that is explained in detail below. If a local value is available, it reads it directly from the dictionary. If no value is set if goes up the logical tree and searches for an inherited value. If no value is found it takes the default value defined in the property metadata. This sequence is a bit simplified, but it shows the main concept.

How to create a DependencyProperty

To create a DependencyProperty, add a static field of type DepdencyProperty to your type and callDependencyProperty.Register() to create an instance of a dependency property. The name of the DependendyProperty must always end with ...Property. This is a naming convention in WPF. To make it accessable as a normal .NET property you need to add a property wrapper. This wrapper does nothing else than internally getting and setting the value by using the GetValue() and SetValue() Methods inherited from DependencyObject and passing the DependencyProperty as key. Important: Do not add any logic to these properties, because they are only called when you set the property from code. If you set the property from XAML the SetValue() method is called directly.

If you are using Visual Studio, you can type propdp and hit 2x tab to create a dependency property.
// Dependency Property public static readonly DependencyProperty CurrentTimeProperty = DependencyProperty.Register( "CurrentTime", typeof(DateTime), typeof(MyClockControl), new FrameworkPropertyMetadata(DateTime.Now)); // .NET Property wrapper public DateTime CurrentTime { get { return (DateTime)GetValue(CurrentTimeProperty); } set { SetValue(CurrentTimeProperty, value); } }

Each DependencyProperty provides callbacks for change notification, value coercion and validation. These callbacks are registered on the dependency property.
new FrameworkPropertyMetadata( DateTime.Now, OnCurrentTimePropertyChanged, OnCoerceCurrentTimeProperty ), OnValidateCurrentTimeProperty );

Value Changed Callback

The change notification callback is a static method, that is called everytime when the value of the TimeProperty changes. The new value is passed in the EventArgs, the object on which the value changed is passed as the source.
private static void OnCurrentTimePropertyChanged(DependencyObject source, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e) { MyClockControl control = source as MyClockControl; DateTime time = (DateTime)e.NewValue; // Put some update logic here... }

Coerce Value Callback

The coerce callback allows you to adjust the value if its outside the boundaries without throwing an exception. A good example is a progress bar with a Value set below the Minimum or above the Maximum.

In this case we can coerce the value within the allowed boundaries. In the following example we limit the time to be in the past.
private static object OnCoerceTimeProperty( DependencyObject sender, object data ) { if ((DateTime)data > DateTime.Now ) { data = DateTime.Now; } return data; }

Validation Callback
In the validate callback you check if the set value is valid. If you return false, an ArgumentException will be thrown. In our example demand, that the data is an instance of a DateTime.
private static bool OnValidateTimeProperty(object data) { return data is DateTime; }

Readonly DependencyProperties
Some dependency property of WPF controls are readonly. They are often used to report the state of a control, like theIsMouseOver property. Is does not make sense to provide a setter for this value. Maybe you ask yourself, why not just use a normal .NET property? One important reason is that you cannot set triggers on normal .NET propeties. Creating a read only property is similar to creating a regular DependencyProperty. Instead of callingDependencyProperty.Register() you call DependencyProperty.RegisterReadonly(). This returns you aDependencyPropertyKey. This key should be stored in a private or protected static readonly field of your class. The key gives you access to set the value from within your class and use it like a normal dependency property. Second thing to do is registering a public dependency property that is assigned toDependencyPropertyKey.DependencyProperty. This property is the readonly property that can be accessed from external.

// Register the private key to set the value private static readonly DependencyPropertyKey IsMouseOverPropertyKey = DependencyProperty.RegisterReadOnly("IsMouseOver", typeof(bool), typeof(MyClass), new FrameworkPropertyMetadata(false)); // Register the public property to get the value public static readonly DependencyProperty IsMouseoverProperty = IsMouseOverPropertyKey.DependencyProperty; // .NET Property wrapper public int IsMouseOver { get { return (bool)GetValue(IsMouseoverProperty); } private set { SetValue(IsMouseOverPropertyKey, value); } }

Attached Properties
Attached properties are a special kind of DependencyProperties. They allow you to attach a value to an object that does not know anything about this value. A good example for this concept are layout panels. Each layout panel needs different data to align its child elements. The Canvas needs Top and Left, The DockPanel needs Dock, etc. Since you can write your own layout panel, the list is infinite. So you see, it's not possible to have all those properties on all WPF controls. The solution are attached properties. They are defined by the control that needs the data from another control in a specific context. For example an element that is aligned by a parent layout panel. To set the value of an attached property, add an attribute in XAML with a prefix of the element that provides the attached property. To set the the Canvas.Top and Canvas.Left property of a button aligned within a Canvas panel, you write it like this:
<Canvas> <Button Canvas.Top="20" Canvas.Left="20" Content="Click me!"/> </Canvas>

public static readonly DependencyProperty TopProperty = DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached("Top", typeof(double), typeof(Canvas), new FrameworkPropertyMetadata(0d, FrameworkPropertyMetadataOptions.Inherits)); public static void SetTop(UIElement element, double value)

{ element.SetValue(TopProperty, value); } public static double GetTop(UIElement element) { return (double)element.GetValue(TopProperty); }

Listen to dependency property changes

If you want to listen to changes of a dependency property, you can subclass the type that defines the property and override the property metadata and pass an PropertyChangedCallback. But an much easier way is to get theDependencyPropertyDescriptor and hookup a callback by calling AddValueChanged()
DependencyPropertyDescriptor textDescr = DependencyPropertyDescriptor. FromProperty(TextBox.TextProperty, typeof(TextBox)); if (textDescr!= null) { textDescr.AddValueChanged(myTextBox, delegate { // Add your propery changed logic here... }); }

How to clear a local value

Because null is also a valid local value, there is the constant DependencyProperty.UnsetValue that describes an unset value.
button1.ClearValue( Button.ContentProperty );

Routed Events

Routed events are events which navigate up or down the visual tree acording to their RoutingStrategy. The routing strategy can be bubble, tunnel or direct. You can hook up event handlers on the element that raises the event or also on other elements above or below it by using the attached event syntax: Button.Click="Button_Click". Routed events normally appear as pair. The first is a tunneling event called PreviewMouseDown and the second is the bubbling called MouseDown. They don't stop routing if the reach an event handler. To stop routing then you have to sete.Handled = true;
Tunneling The event is raised on the root element and navigates down to the visual tree until it reaches the source element or until the tunneling is stopped by marking the event as handeld. By naming convention it is calledPreview... and appears before corresponding bubbling event. Bubbling The event is raised on the source element and navigates up to the visual tree until it reaches the root element or until the bubbling is stopped by marking the event as handled. The bubbling event is raised after the tunneling event. Direct The event is raised on the source element and must be handled on the source element itself. This behavior is the same as normal .NET events.

How to Create a Custom Routed Event

// Register the routed event public static readonly RoutedEvent SelectedEvent = EventManager.RegisterRoutedEvent( "Selected", RoutingStrategy.Bubble, typeof(RoutedEventHandler), typeof(MyCustomControl)); // .NET wrapper public event RoutedEventHandler Selected { add { AddHandler(SelectedEvent, value); } remove { RemoveHandler(SelectedEvent, value); } } // Raise the routed event "selected" RaiseEvent(new RoutedEventArgs(MyCustomControl.SelectedEvent));

Introduction to WPF Layout

Why layout is so important Best Practices Vertical and Horizontal Alignment Margin and Padding Width and Height Content Overflow Handling

Why layout is so important

Layout of controls is critical to an applications usability. Arranging controls based on fixed pixel coordinates may work for an limited enviroment, but as soon as you want to use it on different screen resolutions or with different font sizes it will fail. WPF provides a rich set built-in layout panels that help you to avoid the common pitfalls. These are the five most popular layout panels of WPF:
Grid Panel Stack Panel Dock Panel Wrap Panel Canvas Panel

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Best Practices
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Avoid fixed positions - use the Alignment properties in combination with Margin to position elements in a panel

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Avoid fixed sizes - set the Width and Height of elements to Auto whenever possible. Don't abuse the canvas panel to layout elements. Use it only for vector graphics. Use a StackPanel to layout buttons of a dialog Use a GridPanel to layout a static data entry form. Create a Auto sized column for the labels and a Star sized column for the TextBoxes.

Use an ItemControl with a grid panel in a DataTemplate to layout dynamic key value lists. Use the SharedSize feature to synchronize the label widths.

Vertical and Horizontal Alignment

Use the VerticalAlignment and HorizontalAlignmant properties to dock the controls to one or multiple sides of the panel. The following illustrations show how the sizing behaves with the different combinations.

Margin and Padding

The Margin and Padding properties can be used to reserve some space around of within the control. y y y
The Margin is the extra space around the control. The Padding is extra space inside the control. The Padding of an outer control is the Margin of an inner control.

Height and Width

Alltough its not a recommended way, all controls provide a Height and Width property to give an element a fixed size. A better way is to use

the MinHeight, MaxHeight, MinWidth and MaxWidth properties to define a acceptable range. If you set the width or height to Auto the control sizes itself to the size of the content.

Overflow Handling
Clipping
Layout panels typically clip those parts of child elements that overlap the border of the panel. This behavior can be controlled by setting the ClipToBounds property to true or false.

Scrolling
When the content is too big to fit the available size, you can wrap it into a ScrollViewer. The ScrollViewer uses two scroll bars to choose the visible area. The visibility of the scrollbars can be controlled by the vertical and horizontal ScrollbarVisibility properties.
<ScrollViewer> <StackPanel> <Button Content="First Item" /> <Button Content="Second Item" /> <Button Content="Third Item" /> </StackPanel> </ScrollViewer>

Grid Panel
Introduction How to define rows and columns How to add controls to the grid Resize columns or rows How to share the width of a column over multiple grids Using GridLenghts from code

Introduction

The grid is a layout panel that arranges its child controls in a tabular structure of rows and columns. Its functionality is similar to the HTML table but more flexible. A cell can contain multiple controls, they can span over multiple cells and even overlap themselves. The resize behaviour of the controls is defined by the HorizontalAlignment and VerticalAlignment properties who define the anchors. The distance between the anchor and the grid line is specified by the margin of the control

Define Rows and Columns

The grid has one row and column by default. To create additional rows and columns, you have to add RowDefinitionitems to the RowDefinitions collection and ColumnDefinition items to the ColumnDefinitions collection. The following example shows a grid with three rows and two columns. The size can be specified as an absolute amount of logical units, as a percentage value or automatically.

Fixed Auto

Fixed size of logical units (1/96 inch) Takes as much space as needed by the contained control

Star (*) Takes as much space as available, percentally divided over all star-sized columns. Star-sizes are like percentages, except that the sum of all star columns does not have to be 100%. Remember that star-sizing does not work if the grid size is calculated based on its content.
<Grid> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> <RowDefinition Height="*" /> <RowDefinition Height="28" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" /> <ColumnDefinition Width="200" /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> </Grid>

How to add controls to the grid

To add controls to the grid layout panel just put the declaration between the opening and closing tags of the Grid. Keep in mind that the row- and columndefinitions must precced any definition of child controls. The grid layout panel provides the two attached properties Grid.Column and Grid.Row to define the location of the control.
<Grid> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> <RowDefinition Height="*" /> <RowDefinition Height="28" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" /> <ColumnDefinition Width="200" /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Label Grid.Row="0" Grid.Column="0" Content="Name:"/> <Label Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="0" Content="E-Mail:"/> <Label Grid.Row="2" Grid.Column="0" Content="Comment:"/> <TextBox Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="0" Margin="3" /> <TextBox Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="1" Margin="3" /> <TextBox Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="2" Margin="3" /> <Button Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="3" HorizontalAlignment="Right" MinWidth="80" Margin="3" Content="Send" />

</Grid>

Resizable columns or rows

WPF provides a control called the GridSplitter. This control is added like any other control to a cell of the grid. The special thing is that is grabs itself the nearest gridline to change its width or height when you drag this control around.
<Grid> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="*"/> <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto"/> <ColumnDefinition Width="*"/> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Label Content="Left" Grid.Column="0" /> <GridSplitter HorizontalAlignment="Right" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" Grid.Column="1" ResizeBehavior="PreviousAndNext" Width="5" Background="#FFBCBCBC"/> <Label Content="Right" Grid.Column="2" /> </Grid>

The best way to align a grid splitter is to place it in its own auto-sized column. Doing it this way prevents overlapping to adjacent cells. To ensure that the grid splitter changes the size of the previous and next cell you have to set theResizeBehavior to PreviousAndNext. The splitter normally recognizes the resize direction according to the ratio between its height and width. But if you like you can also manually set the ResizeDirection to Columns or Rows.
<GridSplitter ResizeDirection="Columns"/>

How to share the width of a column over multiple grids

The shared size feature of the grid layout allows it to synchronize the width of columns over multiple grids. The feature is very useful if you want to realize a multi-column listview by using a grid as layout panel within the data template. Because each item contains its own grid, the columns will not have the same width. By setting the attached property Grid.IsSharedSizeScope to true on a parent element you define a scope within the column-widths are shared. To synchronize the width of two columndefinitions, set the SharedSizeGroup to the same name.
<ItemsControl Grid.IsSharedSizeScope="True" > <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <Grid> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition SharedSizeGroup="FirstColumn" Width="Auto"/> <ColumnDefinition Width="*"/> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Path=Key}" TextWrapping="Wrap"/> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Path=Value}" Grid.Column="1" TextWrapping="Wrap"/> </Grid> </DataTemplate> </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> </ItemsControl>

Useful Hints
Columns and rows that participate in size-sharing do not respect Star sizing. In the size-sharing scenario, Star sizing is treated as Auto. Since TextWrapping on TextBlocks within an SharedSize column does not work you can exclude your last column from the shared size. This often helps to resolve the problem.

Using GridLenghts from code

If you want to add columns or rows by code, you can use the GridLength class to define the differenz types of sizes.

Auto sized Star sized Fixed size

GridLength.Auto new GridLength(1,GridUnitType.Star) new GridLength(100,GridUnitType.Pixel)

Grid grid = new Grid(); ColumnDefinition col1 = new ColumnDefinition();

col1.Width = GridLength.Auto; ColumnDefinition col2 = new ColumnDefinition(); col2.Width = new GridLength(1,GridUnitType.Star); grid.ColumnDefinitions.Add(col1); grid.ColumnDefinitions.Add(col2);

More on this topic

How to create a resizable column

WPF StackPanel

Introduction
The StackPanel in WPF is a simple and useful layout panel. It stacks its child elements below or beside each other, dependening on its orientation. This is very useful to create any kinds of lists. All WPF ItemsControls like ComboBox,ListBox or Menu use a StackPanel as their internal layout panel.
<StackPanel> <TextBlock Margin="10" FontSize="20">How do you like your coffee?</TextBlock> <Button Margin="10">Black</Button> <Button Margin="10">With milk</Button> <Button Margin="10">Latte machiato</Button> <Button Margin="10">Chappuchino</Button> </StackPanel>

Stack Items horizontally

A good example for a horizontal stack panel are the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons of a dialog window. Because the size of the text can change if the user changes the font-size or switches the language we should avoid fixed sized buttons. The stack panel aligns the two buttons depending on their desired size. If they need more space they will get it automatically. Never mess again with too small or too large buttons.

<StackPanel Margin="8" Orientation="Horizontal"> <Button MinWidth="93">OK</Button> <Button MinWidth="93" Margin="10,0,0,0">Cancel</Button> </StackPanel>

Built-in Controls of WPF

The WPF framework provides a rich set of built-in controls. The controls can be devided in the following categories. Third Party Controls DataGrid Calendar ItemsControl LivePreview ComboBox Dialogs Slider Popup RadioButton ToolTips TextBox Menus Expander PasswordBox ContextMenu ListBox ListView TextBlock Window

WPF - Third Party Controls

WPF Component Vendors
y y y y y y y
Component Art DevExpress SyncFusion Infragistics Xceed Telerik Actipro

Data Grids
y y y y y y Infragistics Data Grid Xceed Data Grid Component One Data Grid Syncfusion Essential Grid Telerik RadGridView for WPF ComponentArt DataGrid

Misc
y y y y y y y WPF Toolkit Infragistics Tab Control Infragistics MonthCalendar Actipro BarCode Actipro Wizard Actipro Property Grid Mindscape Property Grid Mindscape Flow Diagrams

Charts
y y y y y y y y y y y Infragistics xamChart Swordfish Charts Component One Chart Visifire Chart for WPF and Silverlight WPF Graph on Code Project Free 3D Chart Free High Performance 3D Chart D3 Dynamic Data Display Syncfusion Essential Chart Syncfusion Gauge Telerik RadGauge for WPF

Outlook Bar
y y y y y y Infragistics Outlook Bar Actipro Outlook Bar DevComponents Outlook Bar Odyssey Outlook Bar Odyssey Explorer Bar Telerik RadOutlookBar for WPF

Panels

y y

Telerik RadChart for WPF ComponentArt Chart

y y y

Infragistics Carousel Panel Telerik WPF Carousel Control Telerik RadTileView for WPF

Dialogs Reporting
y Pure WPF FileOpen, FileSave and FolderBrowser Dialogs y y Infragistics Reporting for WPF Component One Reports

Dock Ribbon
y y y y y y y Infragistics Dock Manager Actipro Dock Panel DevComponents Dock Panel WPF Docking Library (Open Source) Avalon Dock (Open Source) Telerik RadDocking for WPF y y y y y y y Fluent Ribbon Control Suite Infragistics Ribbon Actipro Ribbon DevComponents Ribbon Odyssey Ribbon Telerik WPF UI RibbonBar Free Microsoft WPF Ribbon Control

Editors Toolbar
y y y y y Infragistics xamEditors Xceed Editors DevComponents Numeric Editor Telerik RadNumericUpDown for WPF Syncfusion Essential Edit (with Syntax Highlighting) y y Syncfusion Essential Diagram Editor WPF Calendar Control y WPF Theme Selector y y y DevExpress ToolBar Odyssey Breadcrumb Bar ComponentArt Toolbar

Theming

Effects
y Transitionals - Framework to transition between screens. y y WPF Shader and Transition FX Windows Presentation Foundation Pixel Shader Effects Library

Tree
y Telerik RadTree View for WPF

Schedule
y DevComponents Schedule Control

DotWay WPF - Color Picker, Panels and several Shader Effects

y y y y

DevComponents DateTime Picker Component One Schedule Timeline Control Telerik RadScheduler for WPF Free WPF Schedule Control

Telerik Drag&Drop for WPF

GIS and Maps

y y Microsoft Virual Earth Control Sharp Map Control

3D
y Xceed 3D Views

Multimedia Web Browser

y DirectShowLib - .NET Wrapper for DirectShow y y y VideoRenderElement Webcam Control WPF Media Kit - DVD Player, DirectShow, WebCam y Chromium Web Browser

DataBinding in WPF

Introduction
WPF provides a simple and powerful way to auto-update data between the business model and the user interface. This mechanism is called DataBinding. Everytime when the data of your business model changes, it automatically reflects the updates to the user interface and vice versa. This is the preferred method in WPF to bring data to the user interface. Databinding can be unidirectional (source -> target or target <- source), or bidirectional (source <-> target). The source of a databinding can be a normal .NET property or a DependencyProperty. The target property of the bindingmust be a DependencyProperty. To make the databinding properly work, both sides of a binding must provide a change notification that tells the binding when to update the target value. On normal .NET properties this is done by raising the PropertyChanged event of theINotifyPropertyChanged interface. On DependencyProperties it is done by the PropertyChanged callback of the property metadata Databinding is typically done in XAML by using the {Binding} markup extension. The following example shows a simple binding between the text of a TextBox and a Label that reflects the typed value:
<StackPanel> <TextBox x:Name="txtInput" /> <Label Content="{Binding Text, ElementName=txtInput, UpdateSourceTrigger=PropertyChanged}" /> </StackPanel>

DataContext

Every WPF control derived from FrameworkElement has a DataContext property. This property is meant to be set to the data object it visualizes. If you don't explicity define a source of a binding, it takes the data context by default. The DataContext property inherits its value to child elements. So you can set the DataContext on a superior layout container and its value is inherited to all child elements. This is very useful if you want to build a form that is bound to multiple properties of the same data object.
<StackPanel DataContext="{StaticResource myCustomer}"> <TextBox Text="{Binding FirstName}"/> <TextBox Text="{Binding LastName}"/> <TextBox Text="{Binding Street}"/> <TextBox Text="{Binding City}"/> </StackPanel>

ValueConverters
If you want to bind two properties of different types together, you need to use a ValueConverter. A ValueConverter converts the value from a source type to a target type and back. WPF already includes some value converters but in most cases you will need to write your own by implementing the IValueConverter interface. A typical example is to bind a boolean member to the Visibility property. Since the visibility is an enum value that can be Visible, Collapsed or Hidden, you need a value converter.
<StackPanel> <StackPanel.Resources> <BooleanToVisibilityConverter x:Key="boolToVis" /> </StackPanel.Resources> <CheckBox x:Name="chkShowDetails" Content="Show Details" /> <StackPanel x:Name="detailsPanel" Visibility="{Binding IsChecked, ElementName=chkShowDetails, Converter={StaticResource boolToVis}}"> </StackPanel> </StackPanel>

The following example shows a simple converter that converts a boolen to a visibility property. Note that such a converter is already part of the .NET framework.
public class BooleanToVisibilityConverter : IValueConverter {

public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture) { if (value is Boolean) { return ((bool)value) ? Visibility.Visible : Visibility.Collapsed; } return value; } public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture) { throw new NotImplementedException(); } }

Tip: you can derive your value converter from MarkupExtension and return its own instance in the ProvideValueoverride. So you can use it directly without referencing it from the resources. Another Tip: When you get the error "No constructor for type '...' has 0 parameters.", you need to add an default constructor to your converter, even it's not needed. Just for the WPF designer.

How to Navigate, Group, Sort and Filter Data in WPF

What is a CollectionView? Navigation Filtering Sorting Grouping How to create a CollectionView in XAML

What is a CollectionView?
WPF has a powerful data binding infrastructure. It allows you to bind almost any kind of collection directly to a view. But when it comes to sorting, filtering and grouping the support of the collections is rare. That's the point where theCollectionView comes into play. A collection view is a wrapper around a collection that provides the following additional features:
Navigation Sorting Filtering Grouping

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How to Create and Use a CollectionView

The following example shows you how to create a collection view and bind it to a ListBox
<Window xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"> <ListBox ItemsSource={Binding Customers} /> </Window>

public class CustomerView { public CustomerView() { DataContext = new CustomerViewModel(); }

} public class CustomerViewModel { private ICollectionView _customerView; public ICollectionView Customers { get { return _customerView; } } public CustomerViewModel() { IList<Customer> customers = GetCustomers(); _customerView = CollectionViewSource.GetDefaultView(customers); } }

Navigation
The collection view adds support for selection tracking. If you set the property IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem toTrue on the view that the collection is bound to, it automatically synchronizes the current item of the CollectionView and the View.
<ListBox ItemsSource="{Binding Customers}" IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem="True" />

If you are using a MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) pattern, you don't have to extra wire-up the SelectedItem of the control, because it's implicity available over the CollectionView.
IList<Customer> customers = GetCustomers(); ICollectionView _customerView = CollectionViewSource.GetDefaultView(customers); _customerView.CurrentChanged = CustomerSelectionChanged; private CustomerSelectionChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) { // React to the changed selection }

You can also manually control the selection from the ViewModel by calling the MoveCurrentToFirst() orMoveCurrentToLast() methods on the CollectionView.

Filtering
To filter a collection view you can define a callback method that determines if the item should be part of the view or not. That method should have the following signature: bool Filter(object item). Now set the delegate of that method to the Filter property of the CollectionView and you're done.
ICollectionView _customerView = CollectionViewSource.GetDefaultView(customers); _customerView.Filter = CustomerFilter private bool CustomerFilter(object item) { Customer customer = item as Customer; return customer.Name.Contains( _filterString ); }

Refresh the filter

If you change the filter criteria and you want to refresh the view, you have to call Refresh() on the collection view
public string FilterString { get { return _filterString; } set { _filterString = value; NotifyPropertyChanged("FilterString"); _customerView.Refresh(); } }

Sorting
Sorting data ascending or descending by one or multiple criterias is a common requirement for viewing data. The collection view makes it so easy to achieve this goal. Just add as many SortDescriptions as you like to the CollectionView

ICollectionView _customerView = CollectionViewSource.GetDefaultView(customers); _customerView.SortDescriptions.Add( new SortDescription("LastName", ListSortDirection.Ascending );

_customerView.SortDescriptions.Add( new SortDescription("FirstName", ListSortDirection.Ascending );

Fast Sorting
The sorting technique explained above is really simple, but also quite slow for a large amount of data, because it internally uses reflection. But there is an alternative, more performant way to do sorting by providing a custom sorter.
ListCollectionView _customerView = CollectionViewSource.GetDefaultView(customers); as ListCollectionView; _customerView.CustomSort = new CustomerSorter(); public class CustomerSorter : IComparer { public int Compare(object x, object y) { Customer custX = x as Customer; Customer custY = y as Customer; return custX.Name.CompareTo(custY.Name); } }

Grouping
Grouping is another powerful feature of the CollectionView. You can define as many groups as you like by addingGroupDescriptions to the collection view. Note: Grouping disables virtualization! This can bring huge performance issues on large data sets. So be careful when using it.
ICollectionView _customerView = CollectionViewSource.GetDefaultView(customers); _customerView.GroupDescriptions.Add(new PropertyGroupDescription("Country"));

To make the grouping visible in the view you have to define a special GroupStyle on the view.
<ListBox ItemsSource="{Binding Customers}"> <ListBox.GroupStyle> <GroupStyle.HeaderTemplate> <DataTemplate>

<TextBlock Text="{Binding Path=Name}"/> </DataTemplate> </GroupStyle.HeaderTemplate> </ListBox.GroupStyle> </ListBox>

How to create a CollectionView in XAML

It's also possible to create a CollectionView completely in XAML
<Window xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"> <Window.Resources> <CollectionViewSource Source="{Binding}" x:Key="customerView"> <CollectionViewSource.GroupDescriptions> <PropertyGroupDescription PropertyName="Country" /> </CollectionViewSource.GroupDescriptions> </CollectionViewSource> </Window.Resources> <ListBox ItemSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource customerView}}" /> </Window>

The Model-View-ViewModel Pattern

How the MVVM pattern became convenient
WPF has a very powerful databinding feature, that provides an easy one-way or two-way synchronization of properties. You can directly bind two WPF elements together, but the common use of databinding is to bind some kind of data to the view. This is done by using the DataContext property. Since the DataContext property is marked as inherited, it can be set on the root element of a view and it's value is inherited to all subjacent elements of the view. One big limitation of using the DataContext property as data source is, that there is only one of it. But in a real life project you usually have more than one data object per view. So what can we do? The most obvious approach is to aggreate all data objects into one single object that exposes the aggregated data as properties and that can be bound to theDataContext. This object is called the view model.

Separation of logic and presentation

The MVVM pattern is so far only a convenient way to bind data to the view. But what about user actions, how are they handeld? The classic approach, known from WinForms is to register an event handler, that is implemented in the code-behind file of the view. Doing this has some disadvantages:
Having event handlers in the code-behind is bad for testing, since you cannot mock away the view. Changing the design of the view often also requires changes in the code, since every element has it's different event handlers.

y y

The logic is tightly bound to the view. It's not possible to reuse the logic in an other view

So the idea is to move the whole presentation logic to the view model by using another feature of WPF, namely Commands. Commands can be bound like data and are supported by many elements as buttons, togglebuttons, menuitems, checkboxes and inputbindings. The goal here is not to have any line of logic in the codebehind of a view. This brings you the following advantages

y y y

The view-model can easily be tested by using standard unit-tests (instead of UI-testing) The view can be redesigned without changing the viewmodel, because the interface stays the same. The view-model can even be reused, in sone special cases (this is usually not recommended)

What's the difference between MVVM, MVP and MVC?

There is always some confusion about the differences between model-view-presenter, model-viewcontroller an MVVM pattern. So I try to define and distinguish them a bit more clearly.

MVC - Model-View-Controller
The MVC pattern consists of one controller that directly gets all user input. Depending of the kind of input, he shows up a different view or modifies the data in the model. The model and the view are created by the controller. The view only knows about the model, but the model does not know about any other objects. The pattern was often used in good old MFC and now in ASP.NET MVC

MVP - Model-View-Presenter
In the MVP pattern, the view gets the user input and forwards it to the presenter. The presenter than modifies the view or the model depending on the type of user action. The view and the presenter are tightly coupled. There is a bidirectional one-to-one relation between them. The model does not know about the presenter. The view itself is passive, thats why it's called presenter pattern, since the presenter pushes the data into the view. This pattern is often seen in WinForms and early WPF applications.

MVVM - Model-View-ViewModel
The model-view-viewmodel is a typically WPF pattern. It consists of a view, that gets all the user input and forwards it to the viewmodel, typically by using commands. The view actively pulls the data from the viewmodel by using databinding. The model does not know about the view model.

Also check out this interesting article from Costas Bakopanos, a friend of mine, a discussion about the model, states and controllers in the MVVM environment.

Some MVVM Frameworks

Check out this handy tool to compare MVVM frameworks: MVVM Comparison Tool (Silverlight

y y y y y y y y y y y

PRISM (Microsoft) MVVM Light (Laurent Bugnion) WPF Application Framework Chinch Caliburn Micro Core MVVM Onyx nRoute MVVM Foundation How to build your own MVVM Framework

Data Validation in WPF

What we want to do is a simple entry form for an e-mail address. If the user enters an invalid email address, the border of the textbox gets red and the tooltip is showing the reason.

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Implementing a ValidationRule (.NET 3.0 style)

In this example I am implementing an generic validation rule that takes a regular expression as validation rule. If the expression matches the data is treated as valid.
/// <summary> /// Validates a text against a regular expression /// </summary> public class RegexValidationRule : ValidationRule { private string _pattern; private Regex _regex; public string Pattern { get { return _pattern; } set { _pattern = value; _regex = new Regex(_pattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase); } } public RegexValidationRule() { } public override ValidationResult Validate(object value, CultureInfo ultureInfo) { if (value == null || !_regex.Match(value.ToString()).Success)

y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y y

{ return new ValidationResult(false, "The value is not a valid email address"); } else { return new ValidationResult(true, null); } } }

First thing I need to do is place a regular expression pattern as string to the windows resources
<Window.Resources> <sys:String x:Key="emailRegex">^[a-zA-Z][\w\.-]*[a-zA-Z0-9]@ [a-zA-Z0-9][\w\.-]*[a-zA-Z0-9]\.[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z\.] *[a-zA-Z]$</sys:String> </Window.Resources>

Build a converter to convert ValidationErrors to a multi-line string

The following converter combines a list of ValidationErrors into a string. This makes the binding much easier. In many samples on the web you see the following binding expression: {Binding RelativeSource={RelativeSource Self},Path=(Validation.Errors)[0].ErrorContent} This expression works if there is one validation error. But if you don't have any validation errors the data binding fails. This slows down your application and causes the following message in your debug window: System.Windows.Data Error: 16 : Cannot get Item[] value (type ValidationError) from (Validation.Errors) (type ReadOnlyObservableCollection`1 ). BindingExpression:Path=(0).[0].ErrorContent; DataItem=TextBox... The converter is both, a value converter and a markup extension. This allows you to create and use it at the same time.

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[ValueConversion(typeof(ReadOnlyObservableCollection<ValidationError>), typeof(string))] public class ValidationErrorsToStringConverter : MarkupExtension, IValueConverter { public override object ProvideValue(IServiceProvider serviceProvider) { return new ValidationErrorsToStringConverter(); }

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public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture) { ReadOnlyObservableCollection<ValidationError> errors = value as ReadOnlyObservableCollection<ValidationError>; if (errors == null) { return string.Empty; } return string.Join("\n", (from e in errors select e.ErrorContent as string).ToArray()); } public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture) { throw new NotImplementedException(); } }

Create an ErrorTemplate for the TextBox

Next thing is to create an error template for the text box.
<ControlTemplate x:Key="TextBoxErrorTemplate" TargetType="Control"> <Grid ClipToBounds="False" > <Image HorizontalAlignment="Right" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="16" Height="16" Margin="0,-8,-8,0" Source="{StaticResource ErrorImage}" ToolTip="{Binding ElementName=adornedElement, Path=AdornedElement.(Validation.Errors), Converter={k:ValidationErrorsToStringConverter}}"/> <Border BorderBrush="Red" BorderThickness="1" Margin="-1"> <AdornedElementPlaceholder Name="adornedElement" /> </Border> </Grid> </ControlTemplate>

The ValidationRule and the ErrorTemplate in Action

Finally we can add the validation rule to our binding expression that binds the Text property of a textbox to a EMail property of our business object.
<TextBox x:Name="txtEMail" Template={StaticResource TextBoxErrorTemplate}> <TextBox.Text> <Binding Path="EMail" UpdateSourceTrigger="PropertyChanged" >

y y y y y y y y y y

<Binding.ValidationRules> <local:RegexValidationRule Pattern="{StaticResource emailRegex}"/> </Binding.ValidationRules> </Binding> </TextBox.Text> </TextBox>

How to manually force a Validation

If you want to force a data validation you can manually call UpdateSource() on the binding expression. A useful scenario could be to validate on LostFocus() even when the value is empty or to initially mark all required fields. In this case you cann callForceValidation() in the Loaded event of the window. That is the time, when the databinding is established. The following code shows how to get the binding expression from a property of a control.

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private void ForceValidation() { txtName.GetBindingExpression(TextBox.TextProperty).UpdateSource(); }

ValueConverters

Introduction
If you want to databind two properties that have incompatible types, you need a piece of code in between, that converts the value from source to target type and back. This piece of code is called ValueConverter. A value converter is a class, that implements the simple interface IValueConverter with the two methods object Convert(object value) andobject ConvertBack(object value).

How to implement a ValueConverter

WPF already provides a few value converts, but you will soon need to implement your own converts. To do this, add a class to your project and call it [SourceType]To[TargetType]Converter. This is a common naming for value converters. Make it public and implement the IValueConverter interface. That's all you need to do.
public class BoolToVisibilityConverter : IValueConverter { public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture) { // Do the conversion from bool to visibility } public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture) { // Do the conversion from visibility to bool } }

How to use a ValueConverter in XAML

First thing you need to do is to map the namespace of your converter to a XAML namespace. Then you can create an instance of a value converter in the resources of the view and give it a name. Then you can reference it by using{StaticResource}
<Window x:Class="VirtualControlDemo.Window1" ... xmlns:l="clr-namespace:VirtualControlDemo" ...> <Window.Resources> <l:BoolToVisibilityConverter x:Key="converter" /> </Window.Resources> <Grid> <Button Visibility="{Binding HasFunction, Converter={StaticResource converter}}" /> </Grid> </Window>

Simplify the usage of ValueConvers

If you want to use a normal ValueConverter in XAML, you have to add an instance of it to the resources and reference it by using a key. This is cumbersome, because and the key is typically just the name of the converter. A simple and cool trick is to derive value converters from MarkupExtension. This way you can create and use it in the binding like this: Text={Binding Time, Converter={x:MyConverter}}, and that is quite cool!
public abstract class BaseConverter : MarkupExtension { public override object ProvideValue(IServiceProvider serviceProvider) { return this; } }

StringFormat Converter
The StringFormatConverter is a useful converter to control the format of an implicit string conversion of an object (e.g. if you bind a DateTime to a TextBlock ).
[ValueConversion(typeof(object), typeof(string))]

public class StringFormatConverter : BaseConverter, IValueConverter { public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) { string format = parameter as string; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(format)) { return string.Format(culture, format, value); } else { return value.ToString(); } public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) { return null; } }

Behaviors

A simple Border can be dragged by mouse - because of an attached drag behavior.

Introduction
Behaviors are a new concept, introduced with Expression Blend in Version 3, to encapsulate pieces of functionality into a reusable component. These components than can be attached to controls to give them an additional behavior. The ideas behind behaviors are to give the interaction designer more flexibility to design complex user interactions without writing any code. Example of a behaviors are drag&drop, input validation, pan and zoom, re-position of elements, etc... The list of possible behaviors is very long. Imaging an application that has a list of customers and the user can add some of them to subscriber lists. This interaction can be designed by providing an "Add" button next to each subscriber list. But if the interaction designer wants to add drag&drop functionality, he needs to discuss it with the developer and wait until the implementation is done. With behaviors he just drags a drag and drop behavior on each list and we are done.

How to use behaviors in Expression Blend 3

Using behaviors in Expression Blend is as simple as adding an element to the design surface. In the asset library you find a new secion called "Behaviors". It lists all behaviors available within your project. Just grab one of these and drag it onto the element you want to add this behavior and thats it. The behavior appears as an child element in the visual tree. By clicking on it you can configure the properties of the behavior.

How does it work

To add behaviors to an element you need some kind of an extension point. This is an attached property calledInteraction.Behaviors. This attached property holds the list of behaviors for that element and pass a reference to the element into the behavior. The behavior than can register itself to events and property changes and so extend the functionality of the element. The idea is simple, but very clever. They don't need any new infrastructure, they just reuse the existing one.
<Border Background="LightBlue" > <e:Interaction.Behaviors>

<b:DragBehavior/> </e:Interaction.Behaviors> <TextBlock Text="Drag me around!" /> </Border>

How to implement your own behavior

The following example shows the implementation of the drag behavior we used above. Just derive from Behavior<T;gt; and override the OnAttached() method.
public class DragBehavior : Behavior<UIElement> { private Point elementStartPosition; private Point mouseStartPosition; private TranslateTransform transform = new TranslateTransform(); protected override void OnAttached() { Window parent = Application.Current.MainWindow; AssociatedObject.RenderTransform = transform; AssociatedObject.MouseLeftButtonDown += (sender, e) => { elementStartPosition = AssociatedObject.TranslatePoint( new Point(), parent ); mouseStartPosition = e.GetPosition(parent); AssociatedObject.CaptureMouse(); }; AssociatedObject.MouseLeftButtonUp += (sender, e) => { AssociatedObject.ReleaseMouseCapture(); }; AssociatedObject.MouseMove += (sender, e) => { Vector diff = e.GetPosition( parent ) - mouseStartPosition; if (AssociatedObject.IsMouseCaptured) { transform.X = diff.X; transform.Y = diff.Y; } }; } }

List of some popular behaviors

Since its so cool and easy to create your own pice of interactivity, I am sure that we will find hunderts of behaviors available soon. I tried to make a list of some popular ones.
Zoom Behavior Glass Behavior Shake Behavior Transparency Behavior

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User Experience Design Process

User Experience becomes a Key Success Factor
In the past, we focused mainly on building products that fulfilled the functional requirements of the user. User experience was often considered late in the development process. But today the customer demands more than just a working product. Providing the right features is still the prerequisite for a good product, but to turn it into something extraordinary you need to provide a good user experience! Providing a rich user experience is not a thing of fortune. It needs to be planed, designed and integrated into the development of a product. Designing a rich user experience is not only about make up your user interface by some graphics and gradients - its a much broader concept. Its about creating an emotional connection between the user and your software. It makes the user feel good and so he likes to continue using the software.

New Tools for Designers

Microsoft recognized, give development teams the power to create rich user experiences it needs a lot more graphical tool support than VisualStudio can provide today. So they decided to create a new tool suite - made for designers.

This tool suite is called Microsoft Expression. It consists of the four products:
Expression Blend is built to create user interfaces in WPF and Silverlight. It builds the bridge between designer and developers. It can open VisualStudio solutions

Expression Design is a leightweight version of Adobe Illustrator to create and edit vector graphics.

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Expression Media is built to encode, cut and enrich video files and optimize them for silverlight streaming Expression Web is Microsoft next generation of HTML and Javascript editor. Its the replacement for Frontpage.

Together they are a powerful package. The following illustration shows a sample workflow of integrating a vector image that is created by a graphics designer in Adobe Illustrator into a WPF project that is part of a VisualStudio solution.

Development Workflow of a WPF Project

Developing a WPF application with a rich user experience requires a lot more skills than just a requirements analyst that defines a list of use cases and developer that implements the software. You have to find out what the user really needs. This can be done by following a user centered approach.

1. Elicit Requirements
Like in any kind of software projects its important to know and focus the target of your development. You should talk to stakeholders and users to find out the real needs. These needs should be refined to features and expressed in use cases (abstract) or user scenarios (illustrative). Priorize the tasks by risk and importance and work iteratively. This work is done by the role of the requirements engineer.

2. Create and Validate UI Prototype

Creating a user interface prototype is an important step to share ideas between users and engineers to create a common understanding of the interaction design. This task is typically done by an interaction designer. It's helpful to only sketch the user interface in a rough way to prevent early discussions about design details. There are multiple techniques and tools to do this. Some of them are:
Paper prototype Use paper and pencil to draw rough sketches of your user interface. No tools and infrastructure is needed. Everyone can just scribble thier ideas on the paper.

Wireframes Wireframes are often used to sketch the layout of a page. It's called wireframes because you just draw the outlines of controls and images. This can be done with tools like PowerPoint or Visio

Expression Blend 3 - Sketch Flow Sketch flow is a new cool feature to create interactive prototypes directly in WPF. You can use the integrated "wiggly style" to make it look sketchy. The prototype can be run in a standalone player that has an integrated feedback mechanism.

Interactive Prototype The most expensive and real approach is to create an (reusable) interactive prototype that works as the real application but with dummy data.

It is strongly recommended to test your UI prototype on real users. This helps you to find out and address design problems early in the development process. The following techniques are very popular to evaluate UI prototypes:

Walktrough A walktrough is usually done early in a project with wireframes or paper prototypes. The user gets a task to solve and he controlls the prototype by touching on the paper. The test leader than presents a new paper showing the state after the interaction.

Usability Lab To do a usability lab, you need a computer with a screen capture software and a camera. The proband gets an task to do and the requirements and interaction engineer watch him doing this. They should not talk to him to find out where he gets stuck and why.

3. Implement Business Logic and Raw User Interface 4. Integrate Graphical Design 5. Test software

Roles
Buliding a modern user interface with a rich user experience requires additional skills from your development team. These skills are described as roles that can be distributed among peoples in your development team.
Developer The developer is responsible to implement the functionality of the application. He creates the data model, implements the business logic and wires all up to a simple view.

Graphical Designer The graphical designer is responsible to create a graphical concept and build graphical assets like icons,logos, 3D models or color schemes. If the graphical designer is familiar with Microsoft Expression tools he directly creates styles and control templates.

Interaction Designer The interaction designer is responsible for the content and the flow of a user interface. He creates wireframes or UI sketches to share its ideas with the team or customer. He should validate his work by doing walktroughs or storyboards.

Integrator The integrator is the artist between the designer and the developer world. He takes the assets of the graphical designer and integrates them into the raw user interface of the developer. This role needs a rare set of skills and so it's often hard to find the right person for it.

Introduction to Styles in WPF

Introduction
Imagine you want to create an application with a unique design. All your buttons should have an orange background and an italic font. Doing this the conventional way means that you have to set the Background and the FontStyle property on every single button.

<StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" VerticalAlignment="Top"> <Button Background="Orange" FontStyle="Italic" Padding="8,4" Margin="4">Styles</Button> <Button Background="Orange" FontStyle="Italic" Padding="8,4" Margin="4">are</Button> <Button Background="Orange" FontStyle="Italic" Padding="8,4" Margin="4">cool</Button> </StackPanel>

This code is neither maintainable nor short and clear. The solution for this problem are styles. The concept of styles let you remove all properties values from the individual user interface elements and combine them into a style. A style consists of a list of setters. If you apply this style to an element it sets all properties with the specified values. The idea is quite similar to Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS) that we know from web development. To make the style accessible to your controls you need to add it to the resources. Any control in WPF have a list of resources that is inherited to all controls beneath the visual tree. That's the reason why we need to specify a x:Key="myStyle"property that defines a unique resource identifier. To apply the style to a control we set the Style property to our style. To get it from the resources we use the{StaticResource [resourceKey]} markup extension.
<Window> <Window.Resources> <Style x:Key="myStyle" TargetType="Button"> <Setter Property="Background" Value="Orange" /> <Setter Property="FontStyle" Value="Italic" /> <Setter Property="Padding" Value="8,4" /> <Setter Property="Margin" Value="4" /> </Style> </Window.Resources>

<StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" VerticalAlignment="Top"> <Button Style="{StaticResource myStyle}">Styles</Button> <Button Style="{StaticResource myStyle}">are</Button> <Button Style="{StaticResource myStyle}">cool</Button> </StackPanel> </Window>

What we have achieved now is

A maintainable code base Removed the redundancy Change the appearance of a set of controls from a single point Possibility to swap the styles at runtime.

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Style inheritance
A style in WPF can base on another style. This allows you to specify a base style that sets common properties and derive from it for specialized controls.
<Style x:Key="baseStyle"> <Setter Property="FontSize" Value="12" /> <Setter Property="Background" Value="Orange" /> </Style>

<Style x:Key="boldStyle" BasedOn="{StaticResource baseStyle}"> <Setter Property="FontWeight" Value="Bold" /> </Style>

Control Templates
Introduction
Controls in WPF are separated into logic, that defines the states, events and properties and template, that defines the visual appearance of the control. The wireup between the logic and the template is done by DataBinding. Each control has a default template. This gives the control a basic appearance. The default template is typically shipped together with the control and available for all common windows themes. It is by convention wrapped into a style, that is identified by value of the DefaultStyleKey property that every control has. The template is defined by a dependency property called Template. By setting this property to another instance of a control template, you can completely replace the appearance (visual tree) of a control.

The control template is often included in a style that contains other property settings. The following code sample shows a simple control template for a button with an ellipse shape.
<Style x:Key="DialogButtonStyle" TargetType="Button"> <Setter Property="Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate TargetType="{x:Type Button}"> <Grid>

<Ellipse Fill="{TemplateBinding Background}" Stroke="{TemplateBinding BorderBrush}"/> <ContentPresenter HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center"/> </Grid> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style>

<Button Style="{StaticResource DialogButtonStyle}" />

A Button without and with a custom control template

ContentPresenter
When you create a custom control template and you want to define a placeholder that renders the content, you can use theContentPresenter. By default it adds the content of the Content property to the visual tree of the template. To display the content of another property you can set the ContentSource to the name of the property you like.

Triggers

{RelativeSource TemplatedParent} not working in DataTriggers of a ControlTemplate

If you want to bind to a property of a property on your control like Data.IsLoaded you cannot use a normal Trigger, since it does not support this notation, you have to use a DataTrigger. But when you are using a DataTrigger, with {RelativeSource TemplatedParent} it will not work. The reason is, thatTemplatedParent can only be used within the ControlTemplate. It is not working in the Trigger section. You have to use the {RelativeSource Self} instead.

What if a Binding working or a Setter is not applied when using a control template
There is something you need to know when setting a value of an element within a control template: The value does have a lower precendence as the local value! So if you are setting the local value in the constructor of the contained element, you cannot override it within the controltemplate. But if you use the element directly in your view, it will work. So be aware of this behavior!. Here you can find more information about DependencyProperty value precendence: Dependency Property Value Precedence

Data Templates
Introduction
Data Template are a similar concept as Control Templates. They give you a very flexible and powerful solution to replace the visual appearance of a data item in a control like ListBox, ComboBox or ListView. In my opinion this is one of the key success factory of WPF. If you don't specify a data template, WPF takes the default template that is just a TextBlock. If you bind complex objects to the control, it just calls ToString() on it. Within a DataTemplate, the DataContext is set the data object. So you can easily bind against the data context to display various members of your data object

DataTemplates in Action: Building a simple PropertyGrid

Whereas it was really hard to display complex data in a ListBox with WinForms, its super easy with WPF. The following example shows a ListBox with a list of DependencyPropertyInfo instances bound to it. Without a DataTemplate you just see the result of calling ToString() on the object. With the data template we see the name of the property and a TextBox that even allows us to edit the value.

<!-- Without DataTemplate --> <ListBox ItemsSource="{Binding}" /> <!-- With DataTemplate --> <ListBox ItemsSource="{Binding}" BorderBrush="Transparent" Grid.IsSharedSizeScope="True" HorizontalContentAlignment="Stretch"> <ListBox.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <Grid Margin="4"> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" SharedSizeGroup="Key" /> <ColumnDefinition Width="*" /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}" FontWeight="Bold" /> <TextBox Grid.Column="1" Text="{Binding Value }" /> </Grid> </DataTemplate> </ListBox.ItemTemplate> </ListBox>

How to use a DataTemplateSelector to switch the Template depending on the data

Our property grid looks nice so far, but it would be much more usable if we could switch the editor depending on the type of the property.

The simplest way to do this is to use a DataTemplateSelector. The DataTemplateSelector has a single method to override: SelectTemplate(object item, DependencyObject container). In this method we decide on the provided item which DataTemplate to choose. The following exmple shows an DataTemplateSelector that decides between tree data templates:
public class PropertyDataTemplateSelector : DataTemplateSelector { public DataTemplate DefaultnDataTemplate { get; set; } public DataTemplate BooleanDataTemplate { get; set; } public DataTemplate EnumDataTemplate { get; set; } public override DataTemplate SelectTemplate(object item, DependencyObject container) { DependencyPropertyInfo dpi = item as DependencyPropertyInfo; if (dpi.PropertyType == typeof(bool)) { return BooleanDataTemplate; } if (dpi.PropertyType.IsEnum) { return EnumDataTemplate; } return DefaultnDataTemplate; } }

<Window x:Class="DataTemplates.Window1" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:l="clr-namespace:DataTemplates" xmlns:sys="clr-namespace:System;assembly=mscorlib"> <Window.Resources> <!-- Default DataTemplate --> <DataTemplate x:Key="DefaultDataTemplate"> ... </DataTemplate> <!-- DataTemplate for Booleans --> <DataTemplate x:Key="BooleanDataTemplate"> ... </DataTemplate>

<!-- DataTemplate for Enums --> <DataTemplate x:Key="EnumDataTemplate"> ... </DataTemplate> <!-- DataTemplate Selector --> <l:PropertyDataTemplateSelector x:Key="templateSelector" DefaultnDataTemplate="{StaticResource DefaultDataTemplate}" BooleanDataTemplate="{StaticResource BooleanDataTemplate}" EnumDataTemplate="{StaticResource EnumDataTemplate}"/> </Window.Resources> <Grid> <ListBox ItemsSource="{Binding}" Grid.IsSharedSizeScope="True" HorizontalContentAlignment="Stretch" ItemTemplateSelector="{StaticResource templateSelector}"/> </Grid> </Window>

How to react to IsSelected in the DataTemplate

If you want to change the appearance of a ListBoxItem when it is selected, you have to bind the IsSelected property of the ListBoxItem. But this is a bit tricky, you have to use a relative source with FindAcestor to navigate up the visual tree until you reach the ListBoxItem.
<DataTemplate x:Key="DefaultDataTemplate"> <Border x:Name="border" Height="50"> ... </Border> <DataTemplate.Triggers> <DataTrigger Binding="{Binding RelativeSource= {RelativeSource Mode=FindAncestor, AncestorType= {x:Type ListBoxItem}},Path=IsSelected}" Value="True"> <Setter TargetName="border" Property="Height" Value="100"/> </DataTrigger> </DataTemplate.Triggers> </DataTemplate>