Style=”{StaticResource {x:Type BaseClass}}”

Of course in Silverlight, there is no x:Type.

The solution I used was to make an attached behavior that takes the class that has the style, finds the style in the resources and applies it.

The problem

Using a TextBox as an example, here’s some default styling that doesn’t get applied to the subclass:

It ends up looking like this:

The Solution

With an attached behavior, it can look like this (the bottom TextBoxSubclass has the default TextBox style applied):

    <StackPanel>

The attached behavior is pretty simple:

Conclusion

I think its exceedingly obvious how you could apply this universally as a default style on the subclass.  This looks like it has potential to be a pattern to compensate for other Silverlight omissions too.

You can download the full tiny demo on GitHub.

In any case, I’m excited to try out Caliburn Micro and my experience so far has been positive, but more on that later.

My demo covers

• Cmdlets
• Piping
• Working with XML
• Compiling C# on the fly in a script
• Using the object just created in the same PowerShell
• Configuring the Debug tab in VS 2010 for launching ISE (Integrated Script Environment)
• Setting a break point in that C# file, run a script and step through both the C# and PowerShell
• I conclude with ShowUI, a PowerShell module to help build WPF user interfaces in script. ShowUI makes the complicated world of WPF easy to use in PowerShell

The talk ran over by more then 30 minutes with questions and scenarios. I done this talk several times and this time round the questions were deeper and broader than usual.

Two new questions I got, “How can you embed PowerShell in C#?”, “Can I use PowerShell in a web page like JavaScript?”

It was a great time.

More ShowUI Resources

• Download it HERE
• PowerShell ShowUI Video Tutorial–Hello World
• More Videos
• ShowUI: the tutorial walkthrough

Basic Building Blocks

In the video I demo the basic building blocks you’ll reuse over and over. New-Window, New-StackPanel, New-Label, New-Button and more.

Take a look and let me know what questions you’d liked answered. I’ll include them in the next set of video tutorials.

If you assign a shared Brush resource to the CaretBrush property of the TextBox control, then you start seeing some crazy blinking-light effects at places where the shared Brush is used. It is really fun the first time you see it happening and then on, it is sure to cause some Dilbert style “Mahjobbis Crappus”.

Fortunately the solution is quite simple: DO NOT use a shared brush resource for the CaretBrush !

Demo / Download

Below you will find a sample Silverlight app that shows this in action:

Download Solution/Project

Similar Posts:

• The SpiderWebControl for Silverlight
• A DoubleBorderDecorator to simplify rounded-border decorations
• A SilverLight TreeMap control
• A Carousel component in jQuery
• Generic.xaml must have a build action of Page

One seemingly-trivial-yet-recurring problem in financial software is the need for a live-updating line-chart. However, from multiple conversations with Lab49 folks, as well as from experience during my first project, I’ve learned that most WPF/Silverlight charting packages suck in various ways, especially if you’re updating their data frequently. Seems like everyone just rolls their own line chart and tailors it to each project, but doesn’t share it for some reason. I’d like to break that trend by sharing and early version of my own sparkline control for WPF and Silverlight.

http://github.com/jschementi/sparkline

Sample Usage:

It’s implementation is very basic; Sparkline.AddTimeValue constructs a point at the next time interval and adds it to a Polyline. You can control the sparkline’s visuals, including adding visible points along the line and showing horizontal lines for the latest/highest/lowest values. The source builds assemblies for both .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4.

There are obvious features missing like rendered axis or variable x-axis (time) values, but hopefully this provides a simple starting place for anyone else needing a very simple updating line graph.

By the way, Andre de Cavaignac, a colleague of mine at Lab49, and Daniel Simon shared their own a while back: Live Updating Line Graph in WPF. Let me know if there are any others out there.

Anyways, Happy Mother’s Day!

Isn’t about which of the two is better, its which one can easily sell to developers, developers, developers

Silverlight has always given up its annual numbers of installation every year it’s been at MIX –[…] From an internal source, numbers have dropped!

This year, no numbers were announced.

Read more of  Scott Barnes’ post. He summarizes:

As a developer you’re in the seat of power & influence, understand your role in this equation as once all become a little more collectively alert as to what’s going on the you in turn can shape what happens next. Corporations like Microsoft, Adobe, Google and Apple are more preoccupied with both Advertising Penetration stats. They would do whatever it takes, to get those numbers high, so play them, do not let them play you.

Two significant industry dynamics have taken shape since [Silverlight was introduced] that cause us to emphasize the role of Silverlight differently as a key tool in the developer toolbox.

MIX 11 kicks off next Tuesday, April 12 and the Silverlight Team posted this announcement on Standards-based web, plug-ins, and Silverlight.

Here are some interesting snippets:

• [Microsoft] has shown an unprecedented commitment to being leaders in HTML5 browsers
• [Microsoft] has probably not emphasized enough the tooling for HTML5. We’re going to emphasize that much more going forward [...]
• Over the coming months we’ll be particularly demonstrative of our emphasis on HTML5

I blogged recently:

• Analyze Microsoft MIX11 Session Data With PowerShell of note, there are as many HTML5 sessions as there are Silverlight at MIX11
• Is Microsoft hedging their bet? Where Microsoft sponsors an HTML5 contest. Stating HTML5 and related technologies can provide what you expect from native applications
• HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything Bob Muglia responded about Silverlight questions. Back then he was the leader of the Microsoft Server and Tools Business.

Looks like HTML5 eek out the number of Silverlight sessions, followed closely by Azure.

Count Name
----- ----
   27 Third-Party Speaker
   17 HTML5
   16 Silverlight
   14 Windows Azure
    8 Boot Camp
    7 Cloud Services
    7 jQuery
    6 Media
    4 CSS3
    3 SQL Azure

Use the script at the end of the post to generate your main dataset and pipe it to this PowerShell snippet, producing the above frequency counts.

group -NoElement tag | select -First 10 | sort count –Descending

Here are the HTML5 and Silverlight Sessions.

Tag: HTML5

Title
-----
5 Things You Need To Know To Start Using video and audio Today
50 Performance Tricks to Make Your HTML5 Web Sites Faster
Data in an HTML5 World
Deep Dive Into HTML5 canvas
Design, Content, Code: Start-to-Finish
Designer and Developer: A Case for the Hybrid
Designing Great Experiences for SharePoint 2010
Going Mobile with Your Site on Internet Explorer 9 and Windows Phone 7
HTML5 Canvas Mastery
HTML5 for Silverlight Developers
HTML5 with ASP.NET
HTML5/CSS3 Boot Camp
JavaScript Panel
Modernizing Your Website: SVG meets HTML5
The Devil Went Down to HTTP: Debugging with Fiddler
The Future of HTML5
The View of the World Depends on the Glasses I Wear                   

   Tag: Silverlight

Title
-----
Behind the Scenes of Channel 9 Live at MIX
Creating Windows Phone Applications Using Expression Blend
Deep Dive MVVM
Design, Content, Code: Start-to-Finish
Effective Validation Techniques with MVVM in Silverlight
Flickr API: Tap into Billions of Photos for Windows Phone 7
Get Real! Sketch, Prototype, and Capture Great Ideas with Expression Blend and SketchFlow
Graphics & 3D with Silverlight 5
HTML5 for Silverlight Developers
Introducing Microsoft Media Platform (MMP)
MMP Media Insight
MMP Video Editor
Rx: A Library for Managing Asynchronous Data and Events in your Windows Phone 7 Application
Silverlight Boot Camp
Silverlight for SharePoint Boot Camp
Tips for Improving Performance in Applications Built with Silverlight

This PowerShell snippet takes the denormalized dataset, picks out the sessions tagged with HTML5 or Silverlight, sorts them and then groups the session titles by tag name.

Where {$_.tag -eq 'HTML5' -or $_.tag -eq 'Silverlight'} |
    Sort tag, title -Unique |
    Format-Table Title -GroupBy Tag -AutoSize

PowerShell Script to Read MIX11 OData Feed

With PowerShell, accessing the .NET framework is seamless. Here I use the frameworks WebClient (line 2 and 3) to make quick work of downloading data from the MIX11 OData service. Then I slice and dice the XML, another sweet spot for PowerShell.

$MIX11Url = "http://live.visitmix.com/odata"            

$wc = New-Object net.webclient
[xml]$f =  $wc.DownloadString($MIX11Url + "/Sessions")
$f.feed.entry | % {
  $title = $_.Title.'#text'            

  $href  = $_.link | ?{$_.title -eq 'Tags'} |
      select -ExpandProperty href            

  $xml  = $wc.DownloadString("$($MIX11Url)/$($href)")            

  $ns = @{
    d = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices"
    m = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata"
  }            

  @(Select-Xml -Content $xml -Namespace $ns -XPath "//d:TagValue" |
      select -ExpandProperty node |
      select -ExpandProperty '#text')
  } | % {
      New-Object psobject -Property @{
          Title = $title
          Tag   = $_
      }
}

In the midst of all this:

Microsoft launches contest to encourage HTML5 content creation without browser plug-ins

We believe that HTML5 and related technologies, in conjunction with faster and faster browsers, finally give developers the tools they need to create experiences that are just as vivid, interactive and high-fidelity as what you have come to expect from native applications without the need for plug-ins. We want to see what you can do unplugged…

Current SL DataGrid does not support this feature, but it is possible to implement it quite easily.

When I faced that requirement on a client project I considered two approaches:
1. Transpose the data set
2. Try to style the grid (rotate the grid and counter rotate the cells)

The second approach seemed scary and uncertain (rendering performance, UI gremlins) and I chose to transpose the data. This did work but column features like sorting, reordering, etc were not supported.

Daniel Simon, a Lab49 alumni, faced the same problem and also came up with the same approaches. He took the styling path and styled the grid by rotating it by 90 degrees and counter rotating the cells.

This almost worked. The first column now became the last row. Not quite what we want.

Daniel then figured out to change FlowDirection to right to left and that did fixed the row positioning.

But, there still were some UI problems during scrolling and column reordering.

When I joined that project, with Daniel being the client, I realized that instead of rotating things by 90 degrees we need to flip them around diagonal. In that case no FlowDirection hack was needed and UI quirks were gone.

One last thing that needs to be done is to rewire the arrow keys, so that Up/Down keys change current column instead of row.

Finally, here is a link to a transpose sample - TransposedDataGrid.

In my opinion, there is enough room for everyone unless one technology has all the pros, none of the cons.  Right now, it’s a pick and choose scenario.  If you want rich animations on a platform that has a very high market penetration, use Flash.  If you can control the user environment and want lots of power out of your app, go with Silverlight.  If you want a technology that can display on every device, go with Javascript (since HTML5 isn’t exactly available everywhere yet).

In spite of all this, there’s was a sense of uneasiness in my technology, which is Flash and Flex.  It seems that everyone else (Silverlight, HTML5) was innovating but Flash, which was the king of RIA, wasn’t doing the same.  I don’t mind learning new technologies, heck, it’s the reason I do software, but I like working with Flex.  Many of my coworkers say that a lot of the concepts behind RIA is transferable between technologies.  This is partially true, but the fact is that it took me 10 years to get to where I know the platform, the language and the frameworks in and out.  I don’t want to have to repeat the process of knowing another platform and everything associated with it even if it takes half that time.  Some say that’s a bad mentality to have, which can be true for some developers, but during the time that I’m learning a new technology, I’m not being as efficient, productive or creative as I’d like.

All of this is a thing of the past now.  That feeling went away when I was attending the conference.

Why?  Well, let’s see.  The team in charge of Flex seems to have grown considerably, they are finally coding the framework properly (spark), they are creating a better open source process where community members can submit patches, they now put in place a 6 month release schedule for Flex, they are rebuilding the compiler from scratch, they are listening very intently to the feedback of the developers and are innovating.  That’s only for Flex, the Flash player itself (the platform) is getting some major overhauls as well, like straight to GPU rendering (3D), threading and support for 3rd party controller (like an xbox controller, driving wheel or any other peripherals).

Furthermore, Adobe is really pushing the platform’s multi-screen aspect (desktop, devices and TVs).  They’ve been working on this for years now, but it’s finally coming to fruition.  This alone will be a huge factor when deciding which technology to use.  I got a general feeling that Adobe is doubling its efforts in the Flash platform.

All and all, I got reassured at the conference that Flash and Flex aren’t going anywhere.  These upcoming changes to the platform will reverberate through the RIA community and hopefully increase its momentum.  One thing that Adobe seems to be somewhat clueless about is why isn’t there more Flash/Flex developers.  There are plenty of designers, but definitely not enough developers.  I told them that they should take a page out of Microsoft’s book.  Say what you will about Microsoft, they know how to treat their developers and they keep coming back.

I hope that Adobe figures that part out because a great platform with no developers still means failure.  I can say though that if you are a student, a junior developer or even want to switch technologies, I seriously recommend Flash/Flex.  It has spearheaded my career like I never thought possible.

Highlighted in two articles, from the company and PDC itself:

“Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone,” he said. Silverlight also has some “sweet spots” in media and line-of-business applications, he said. But when it comes to touting Silverlight as Microsoft’s vehicle for delivering a cross-platform runtime, “our strategy has shifted,” Muglia told me. Silverlight will continue to be a cross-platform solution, working on a variety of operating system/browser platforms, going forward, he said. “But HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform,” Muglia said.

Read more here:

• ZDNet: Microsoft: Our Strategy with Sliverlight has Shifted
• TechCrunch: Microsoft Has Seen The Light. And It's Not Silverlight

The big question remaining is what will happen to the Silverlight platform? Will it replace WPF? Or will it head for the graveyard as fast as Windows Phone is destined to? One way or another, it looks like the Microsoft RIA platform is in for an interesting ride, and HTML5 is on it's way into the mainstream.

This is actually really exciting to me. Although HTML5 is in its early days, the future is clearly heading that way. As our customers demand an increasing amount of accessibility in their Single Dealer Platforms, I see HTML5 as the natural long-term solution. People have asked me around Lab49 whether I think that an SDP with realtime data could be built in HTML5 today. My answer has consistently been that if you only support the most modern browsers, than yes. It would be ambitious, you'd be the first, and with that ambition comes a risk higher factor than other alternatives (Flex/Silverlght/WPF), but I believe it is indeed possible, the only question now is who will be the first to do it.

Buckle your seatbelts, RIA is about to be a bumpy ride…

“Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone”

Bob Muglia, Microsoft President.

I went to The Penn Club to attend the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar presentation, HERE is the radar write up.

On Hold

• RIA – Rich Internet Applications. Yes, Silverlight and Flash. Microsoft’s IE9 is poised to be the fasted JavaScript and HTML5 engine on the planet. Not a good sign for Silverlight.

 So I went to watch the video, and found what no one seems to be talking about, the real gem of this Ballmer interview:

Interviewer: "HTML or Silverlight, what is Microsoft's lead strategy for developing rich internet applications? Silverlight, HTML5, or acquiring Adobe?"

Ballmer: "If you want to do something that is universal, there is no question, the world is going HTML5… The world is just pushing down that HTML5 path, and so are we… What we've really done [with Silverlight] in very good ways is to repurpose it as an important part of the client platform, so yes, you will embrace HTML5, but it's also clear people want client apps… So we're dedicated to Silverlight, but with a little different concept, and we're embracing HTML5."

Interesting… looks like Ballmer is saying Silverlight is on its way out as an RIA platform, and HTML5 is the companies strategic bet. Clearly Silverlight is not yet a client platform, but if Silverlight is becoming their strategic client platform, where is WPF going in the longer term?

Watch the video here for yourself, the interesting bits start 2 minutes in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI47b3a9cEI 

I’ll be presenting on WPF at the September 21st .Net Meetup.

A breezy tour of topics in WPF from the ground up with demo examples and source code.  Each topic will be given a one minute treatment.  For anyone interested in, new to, or learning WPF you can see the scope of the platform and see what you want to learn.  For anyone working in WPF, enjoy the highlights of your platform.  You might even see something you’ve missed.

Everything will apply equally to Silverlight, subject of course to this diagram.

• OData PowerShell Explorer
• OData Browser for the iPhone
• OData Explorer (Silverlight 4)
• Sesame Data Browser (Silverlight 4)
• LINQPad (Beta)
• Open Data Protocol Visualizer VS.Net 2010 Extension

via OData Primer

via Microsoft UK Application Development Consulting

I like Jeffrey Snover’s tweet – Become a first follower and join the dance! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ&sns=em

• Silverlight Profiling PowerShell helper – Jason Jarrett uses PowerShell to capture and simply the steps of profiling his Silverlight app
• Script everything with PowerShell and IronRuby – shows how to use PowerShell Runspaces in IronRuby. Same as you would in C#
• Creating WPF UIs for PowerShell with PowerBoots and Visual Studio WPF Designer – Joel Bennett creates a WPF GUI in Visual Studio and use the Xaml file in PowerShell PowerBoots
• A PowerShell Wander: ToolBox Mindset, –ExpandProperty, DMZs and Remote Profiles – Jeffrey Snover writes about PowerShell as a toolbox and has general purpose utilities that creative people can use their inspiration to do things that the tool designers didn’t think of when they developed the tool
• Richard Siddaway uses the Compare-Object cmdlet in Comparing folder contents for diffing subdirectories
• Very useful Test-Member – The Missing PowerShell Cmdlet – Verifies whether a specific property or method member exists for a given .NET object
• PowerShell Script to Connect .ISO to a VM [Hyper-V]

Its funny because its true.  When there’s property setting or UI resizing or several other common UI related problems, putting the next statement on the Dispatcher to let an operation complete first is just the trick.  Handy as Duct Tape.  Case in point, the focus at startup issue.

As an out of the box solution, QTP (version 10) did not provide sufficient granularity with respect to Silverlight object recognition.

Having already been required to install the .Net and WPF plugins, research and contact with HP uncovered the need for three additional patches to be installed; before the spy tool could actually drill down through the Silverlight Window to identify object properties.

Once up and running; one of the noticeable differences between QTP and one of the other tools we evaluated (ArtofTest DesignCanvas 2.0) was the slowness of script capture.

We have to continue with QTP; as the client is understandably reluctant to invest further money in a second tool. Even with this in mind I still have reservations as to the suitability of the tool long term. By admission of HP support site, the patches provided are compatible with Silverlight 2, and ‘may’ be compatible with Silverlight 3; which throws instant concern as Silverlight 4 is available with talk of a Silverlight 5 release early next year. As more projects embrace RIA technologies such as Silverlight and Adobe Flex; HP will need to ensure that their toolsets move with the times; especially with unit costs as high as they are; even with reseller discounts applied.

Over the last couple of days I was working on an internal demo and one of the controls I built for that was a SpiderWebControl. It is a Silverlight 4 custom control that allows you to draw a network graph. A quick run down of the features is given below:

• Adding, removing, renaming of nodes
• Dragging of nodes
• CTRL + Drag to drag a subtree/branch
• CTRL + Drag on the canvas to pan around
• Selections and hovers using VSM
• Simple automatic layout with animations

The following video shows the control in action:

Design choices

There were a few design decisions made while building this control that are worth highlighting:

1. The top level control is called the SpiderWebControl and each node within that control is an instance of the SpiderWebItem. Ideally I would have derived SpiderWebControl from ItemsControl if not for the extra level of control that I wanted for adding items to the ItemsPanel.
2. The node elements (boxes) and the connecting elements (lines) are inside two separate containers. The container that contains the boxes is overlaid on top of the container for lines. This achieves a nice effect of lines that seem to start from the edge of the box. Here you can see the connecting line and the box in different configurations 

   

3. There is a private DependencyProperty on the SpiderWebItem called LinkedConnectorProperty. This is used to store the connector (Line) instance.
4. The SpiderWebControl makes use of the HierarchicalDataTemplate from the Silverlight Toolkit to expand nested levels (sub-branches)

Sidebar

Some of the ideas in the above list are discussed in more detail in my book “WPF Control Development Unleashed”. Although the concepts are WPF specific, the ideas apply equally well to Silverlight.

Demo and code

I am sure you will agree that this post would be incomplete without a real demo and source code

Download Source codeSimilar Posts:

• Progressive reveal animations in SVG using a <svg:clipPath>
• Building a tree diagram in D3.js
• A SilverLight TreeMap control
• Bug fix in the sample on Virtualization in WPF Control Development Unleashed
• Quick tip about changing SketchFlow’s startup page name (Silverlight)

HtmlPage.Plugin.Focus();
Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() => YourControl.Focus());

This may be the first (and probably the last) actual Silverlight mystery I have solved.  A couple months ago, I was searching the internet for the way to do this and found absolutely nothing.

Yippee-Kai-Yay for me

I’m a fan of Flash, but like most things in life, it isn’t perfect.  Flex and Actionscript have been an integral part of my career and I would like them to continue to be so.  I would like to touch on certain concepts that I think would add more value to the current software offerings and in turn give Adobe an edge over the competition.

Time is an important asset for a company, which is why increasing development efficiency will be a key factor in winning this war. I’m talking about reducing the compiler time, making it smarter and bug free, and adding 64bit support to utilise workstation performance. This improvement can save valuable minutes or even hours depending on the developer.

Speaking of development efficiency, I also suggest that Flash Builder starts supporting Linux.  Adobe doesn’t even have to officially support it, just make sure the eclipse plug-in can work in a Linux environment with or without design view (I personally never use it).  The feature request for having Flash Builder on Linux is one of the most popular requests on the Adobe bug tracker.

Irritations while using Flash products also need to be eliminated. I personally enjoy development work (geek alert!), but when something doesn’t work like expected, it frustrates me to no end. The Flex framework is fairly good at doing exactly that; it’s supposed to save time, and it does, but there are some components that have been buggy ever since its inception and they aren’t being fixed.

The next point is cause for debate between developers, in the end it comes down to preference, but it needs to be addressed. Of course, I’m talking about Cairngorm – or more specifically your decision to support it. I personally don’t think MVC is the pattern to use when handling a Flex application, and other developers in the community agree; hence the creation of several new open- source frameworks. It seems to me that Adobe is playing favorites with Cairngorm and could instead use that development effort in a more productive way.  Adobe should work on enhancing the Flash API and opening up doors to allow third party frameworks to improve their usability.

With complex applications come crucial new ways to design the flow and interaction within the system.  For that, a developer needs tools to show this visually.  Tools like wireframe UI timeline or UML round-trip engineering can combine both design and functionality in a uniform way that all developers can understand.  A lot could be learned from Java and their tools: e.g. offering code hot-swapping to greatly reduce debugging time.

If Adobe is serious about creating a developer language, then a more complex language needs to be their goal.  Multiple-inheritance, polymorphism, overloading, enumerators, abstract classes, destructors, private constructors, decimal data type, threading support – these are only a few of the things that Actionscript is lacking. Some would argue that there are a lot more. I’m not saying it’s a bad language, after all, it does do what it’s supposed to do, but with bigger systems come more architectural complexities that the current language cannot support.

A common topic when debating Silverlight vs Flex is the lack of multi-threading.  I really do hope that this will be implemented in the next iteration of the language because the possibilities it would open would be mind-blowing.  Imagine a system that can execute complex algorithms and computations without disrupting the user experience; that would be a major improvement! Heck, even if the language doesn’t give developers access to threads, just allowing the player to run different threads for visual components and for computations would be a great improvement.

Let me leave you with this: I’ve been a fan of Adobe since I was a kid, and I still am. If any business is capable of surmounting the upcoming challenge, it will be Adobe. I believe that the community surrounding this product will be a key factor in this war; if Adobe listens and responds to our suggestions, only great things can happen.

Speaking of community, I invite all developers and designers to debate and comment on this topic. I think it is one that will be talked about for quite some time to come.  I’d also like to thank Joe Morrison, a Director at Lab49, for letting me bounce ideas off of him.

There’s a consensus developing that says dependency properties are usually too heavyweight and people are using INotifyPropertyChanged instead.  I miss the snippet that creates a dependency property, so I made a similar snippet for INotifyPropertyChanged.  You can download the code here.

To make a snippet, just go to Tools / Code Snippets Manager and find a snippet to start with.  I started with the “Define a Dependency Property” snippet since I was doing almost the same thing.  The Snippets Manager will tell you where that file is:

Go to the file system and copy the file to your My Code Snippets folder.  If you highlight the folder in the Code Snippet Manager, it will tell you where it is — you can copy the path from the location field.  The file is an xml file, but needs to be named “.snippet”.

Editing the file is very straightforward and the snippet will be available immediately – no restart needed.

One interesting thing about the code is that I’m using a simple method to do all the work:

I basically combined this CodeProject work with Jeff Yates object.Equals idea from here in order to handle both reference and value types in a single call:

Here’s how the snippet comes out by default (the myNames and type are the replaceable fields):

int _myField;

public int MyProperty
{
    get { return _myField; }
    set
    {
        CheckPropertyChanged("MyProperty",
            ref _myField, ref value);
    }
}

This is the method that does a check and notify in the base class:

protected bool CheckPropertyChanged<T>
      (string propertyName, ref T oldValue, ref T newValue)
      {

            if (!Equals(oldValue, newValue))

            {

                oldValue = newValue;

                RaisePropertyChanged(propertyName);

                return true;

            }

            return false;

        }

Hope this helps some folks.

Similar Posts:

• Controlling Z-Index of children in Custom controls
• An improved water effect
• A tip for referencing Assets in your WPF application
• Drag & Drop with attached properties – Part 3
• Neon – The WPF Particle Engine

via Jeffrey Snover

I finally go to shake the hand of Jeffrey Snover, the man behind the vision of PowerShell. We got to chat for a few minutes before he was on the panel Microsoft Perspectives on the Future of Programming. Some great thinkers on the panel, Butler Lampson, Erik Meijer, Don Box, Jeffrey Snover, Herb Sutter, Burton Smith. Covered Parallel programming (we’ll still be figuring it out in the next 5-10 years), textual DSLs, modeling, importance of glue languages and more.

I’ll be doing some posts on SQL Modeling Services (aka Oslo). Just finished downloading the latest CTP on my main box. It has a dependency on .NET 4, works in VS 2010, has more features and better integration with SQL and VS. Don’t forget to download Pinky’s DynamicObject Over M values. It is a implementation of .NET 4.0 dynamic object over Node/Edge data model provides a read-only object-based view over M values.

Plus sat in on the PowerShell talks. Layering GUIs over PowerShell. Very cool and just the beginning. Download the demos here. They give insight to how Microsoft Exchange re-worked there GUIs to sit on top of PowerShell. Restricted Runspaces for security, Runspace Pools to execute PowerShell asynchronously, Remoting, and the start of how to ‘record’ the PowerShell commands the user is clicking on in the GUI.

Lot’s to experiment, enjoy and engage with.