There are two thing on the new release of .NET that interest me above others the GPU-based effects and the new WriteableBitmap class that I plan to use in future Pixa’s features and I will cover them in future posts.

If you want to learn more on GPU-based Effects for WPF, keep an eye on Greg Schechter’s Blog.

Color Panel

1. The color panel allows you to select the current drawing color by clicking on the selecting area.

   
    

2. You pick a color from anywhere in the application window with the picker tool and double click on the desired color.
    
3. To select a color manually press on the button to open the manual color selection panel.

   

4. Pixa has an option to save working palettes with different styles. The current palette style is the color list on the bottom of the panel.

   You have two viewing options for the palette style list, one as a list and one as grid, to switch between them click on the view mode button .

   

Brush Panel

1. The brush panel let you select, add and edit custom made drawing and erasing brushes.

   

2. To add new brushes to the list just press on the Add button and a new brush will be added to the list.
   
3. To remove a brush, first select it and then press the Remove button.
   
4. To edit a brush press on the Edit button, an option panel will be open; to save the changes and to close the panel, press the Edit button again.

    

And thanks to famfamfam for the free icons used in Pixa.

Enjoy!

Pixa is a drawing program that takes full advantage of WPF. While it looks like a typical raster editor it is actually a vector editor, every stroke you paint on Pixa is actually a Geometry object, this allows you to zoom and resize without affecting the drawing quality.

I have launched a CodePlex project for Pixa, so you can download and play with it or contribute if you wish.

Please take into consideration that Pixa is a “PRE-ALPHA” version and is a long way from stable, I’m releasing it now so I can get feedback and share it with you (if you are interested in the code or your have an artistic soul ).

I will talk in following posts about Pixa’s roadmap, features and explain how I implemented some of the main features.

I will be happy to know what you think.

1. DropShadow and Blur Bitmap effects will be hardware accelerated.
2. Improvements on Text.
3. Media and Video Performance.
4. New WriteableBitmap API will enable real time bitmap manipulation.
5. New Controls like DataGrid, Ribbon and Calendar/DatePicker.
6. Improvements on the VS 2008 WPF Designer.

And one more thing you do not need to recompile your applications to befit from the new features!!! As long as you have the latest updates installed.

1. Create your own Designer or Introduction To Custom Designers – Part 1- Designer
2. Create your own Designer or Introduction To Custom Designers – Part 2- UI, Glyphs

And he had promise me to post about custom designer for WPF controls in the future!!

.NET Base Class Libraries:
System, System.CodeDom, System.Collections
System.ComponentModel, System.Diagnostics
System.Drawing, System.Globalization, System.IO
System.Net, System.Reflection, System.Runtime
System.Security, System.Text, System.Threading, etc.

ASP.NET (System.Web, System.Web.Extensions)
Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms)
Windows Presentation Foundation (System.Windows)
ADO.NET and XML (System.Data and System.Xml)

And soon the LINQ, WCF and the Workflow Foundation will be added.

You can find a detailed post by Shawn Burke that explains the exact steps on how to enable this.

For some reason including a ResourceDictionary into the Themes/generic.xaml does not behave the same as including a ResourceDictionary into App.xaml.

If you include a ResouceDictionary into Themes/generic.xaml you will receive an exception telling you that the dictionary cannot be assigned to property ‘Source’ of object, yada, yada, yada, very informative.

Exception:’MyDictionary.xaml’ value cannot be assigned to property ‘Source’ of object ‘System.Windows.ResourceDictionary’. Cannot loc
ate resource ‘mydictionary.xaml’.  Error at object ‘System.Windows.ResourceDictionary’, Line 9 Position 23.

What the exception is trying to tell you is that the included ResourceDictionary file was not found on the output folder, (meaning that it was expected to be an external resource).

What to do then, instead of:

You should write it like this (specifying that the included resource is embedded into the assembly):

Enjoy.

After being disappointed from the burning features of Windows Vista, I was very happy from what I found.

It works very well under Windows Vista. It doesn’t require installation and its only 8MB in size, what’s make it suitable for running it from a DiskOnKey.

You can download it from here.

Enjoy.

On my first post I described the problem and in second post I proposed and demonstrated a workaround to the problem.

Now after the release of the .NET Frameworks 3.5, I checked it again and hoping that it was fixed, but unfortunately it wasn’t fixed . But the same workarounds that I described in my previous post in this issue still do the jobs.

Update:

if you are not a MSDN subscribers then you have the following alternatives:

1. A 90-day free trial edition of VS2008 Team Suite (here).
2. Visual Studio 2008 Express which is completely free (here).
3. or just the .NET Framework 3.5 runtime (here)

It’s a helpful tool to clean up unused resources and to understand the current resource structure, especially when working with large WPF projects where resources are extensible use.

It’s free to download at the moment and worth to try it!

Matt Davey pointed on his blog to the Surface team blog. The place, you may what to follow and catch up on the new developments of the Surface SDK.

From what I have read the SDK is divided in two layers, core and WPF. The core layer supports any .NET UI Framework that provides an hwnd and its XNA oriented, the WPF layer supports all the functionality of the core layer but it remains consistent with WPF’s methodology.

Also don’t miss to cool Hello world demo video!

Read the press release for more info here.

Enjoy!

Now you want to wrap your control with ScrollViewer, that’s ok.

And you expect that the Ctrl+C will be handled, yes?

Well… NOOOOO!

Why! Because ScrollViewer overrides the OnKeyDown method and it’s preventing it to bubble any further.

Not an expected behavior in my opinion.

What to do? Set the Focusable property of the ScrollViewer to false, and it’s done.

So I decided to create my own class to achieve the task.

What did I do?

1. A BitmapSource derived class that expose a property with the bitmap info and can act as a reference to another BitmapSource.
2. A container struct, BitmapInfo, to hold all the information needed to reconstruct the image, pixel array, size, format, etc.
3. A TypeConverter that convert BitmapInfo to a serialized byte64 string and vice versa.

Using the EmbeddedBitmapSource is seamless as using any other derived BitmapSource class. For example:

Image myImage = new Image();

BitmapImage bmpImage = new BitmapImage( new Uri( “someimage.jpg” ) );

myImage.Source = new EmbeddedBitmapSource( bmpImage );

I included the sources with a sample application that let you save the image into a XAML file (the XAML file can be found after saving where the assembly is) and later to load it.

On the upper right side is the original image and on the lower part of the window is the embedded image that was loaded from the XAML file.

Source code (VS2008 project) can be downloaded from here (Remember to change the .DOC extension to .ZIP)

By the way, I took the picture some year ago in Chile near Puerto Tranquilo. In Lake General Carrera are marble caves formations, called the Capilla de marmol and Catedral de marmol that were carved by water over time. One of those from a specific angle a dog’s head can be seen.

1. The binding between the IsChecked property and a property in the “code behind” works in only if the binding is declared inside a Control Template, see code below.
2. When binding between xaml elements the problem does not occur.

<UserControl

    xmlns=“http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation“

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

    x:Class=“RadioButtonTest.TemplatedControl“

    Height=“300“ Width=“300“ Template=“{DynamicResource UserControlControlTemplate1}“>

  <UserControl.Resources>

    <BooleanToVisibilityConverter x:Key=“BooleanToVisibilityConverter“/>

    <ControlTemplate x:Key=“UserControlControlTemplate1“ TargetType=“{x:Type UserControl}“>

      <Grid>

        <StackPanel VerticalAlignment=“Top“>

          <StackPanel VerticalAlignment=“Top“>

            <RadioButton

                Height=“16“

                HorizontalAlignment=“Left“

                Name=“isEllipse“

                IsChecked=“{Binding Path=IsEllipse,

                                        RelativeSource={RelativeSource TemplatedParent},

                                        Mode=TwoWay,

                                        UpdateSourceTrigger=PropertyChanged}“

                Content=“Ellipse“/>

            <RadioButton

                Height=“16“

                HorizontalAlignment=“Left“

                Name=“isRectangle“

                Content=“Rectangle“/>

          </StackPanel>

          <TextBlock Text=“Binding Visibilty to Radio Button IsChecked “/>

          <TextBlock Text=“property with BooleanToVisibilityConverter:“/>

          <Ellipse x:Name=“EllipseTip“ Fill=“#FF000000“

                  Width=“30“ Height=“30“  StrokeThickness=“1“

                  Visibility=“{Binding Path=IsChecked, Converter={StaticResource BooleanToVisibilityConverter}, ElementName=isEllipse, Mode=Default}“/>

          <Rectangle x:Name=“RectangleTip“ Fill=“#FF000000“

                    Width=“30“ Height=“30“ StrokeThickness=“1“

                      Visibility=“{Binding Path=IsChecked, Converter={StaticResource BooleanToVisibilityConverter}, ElementName=isRectangle, Mode=Default}“/>

          <TextBlock Text=“Binding to SelectionText Property “/>

          <TextBlock Text=“and IsEnabled to rectangle radio button:“/>

          <TextBox Text=“{Binding Path=SelectionText, RelativeSource={RelativeSource TemplatedParent}, Mode=Default}“

          IsEnabled=“{Binding Path=IsChecked, ElementName=isRectangle, Mode=Default}“/>

        </StackPanel>

      </Grid>

    </ControlTemplate>

  </UserControl.Resources>

</UserControl>

I did a sample which uses two similar controls with the difference that one uses a control template and the other do not, and demonstrates the differences while binding to properties on the UserControls (TemplatedControl and NoTemplateControl).

You can download a sample code (VS2008 Beta2 project) here, Remember to change the .DOC extension to .ZIP.

I found that is quite easy, first you need to create a custom control that contains all the increment parameters, described below, the actual value and code to handle the mouse events.

The control exposes the following properties:

1. Value – The actual value.
2. SmallChange – Small change increments done by dragging the mouse and pressing the CTRL key.
3. DefaultChange – Default change increments done by just dragging the mouse.
4. LargeChange – Large change increments done by dragging the mouse and pressing the Shift key.
5. Minimum – Lower bound of the value.
6. Maximum – Upper bound of the value.
7. MaxPrecision – Number of digits after the decimal point.

For the control appearance you need to create a Template Style. Below there is an example of a template that contains a TextBox, a Rectangle for the dragging area and a property triggers to change the cursor to notify the user that dragging is available.

<Style x:Key="NumricEditorStyle" TargetType="{x:Type ValueEditorSample:ValueEditor}">   <Setter Property="Template">   <Setter.Value>   <ControlTemplate TargetType="{x:Type ValueEditorSample:ValueEditor}">   <Grid>   <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>   <ColumnDefinition Width="0.5*"/>   <ColumnDefinition />   </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <TextBox x:Name="PART_EDITOR" Text="{Binding Path=Value, Mode=TwoWay, RelativeSource={RelativeSource TemplatedParent}}" Grid.ColumnSpan="2"/>   <Rectangle x:Name="PART_DRAGGER" Stroke="Transparent" Fill="Transparent" />   </Grid>   <ControlTemplate.Triggers>   <Trigger Property="IsMouseOver" Value="True" SourceName="PART_DRAGGER">   <Setter Property="Cursor" Value="SizeAll"/>   </Trigger>   <Trigger Property="IsDragging" Value="True">   <Setter Property="Cursor" Value="SizeAll"/>   </Trigger>   </ControlTemplate.Triggers>   </ControlTemplate>   </Setter.Value>   </Setter>  </Style>

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