Program With .NET

Crawling Border Animation

Matt Casto — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 02:55:36 GMT

This is a very simple animation that can be used just about anywhere.

[[ If you're viewing this post through an RSS reader, you won't be able to see the Silverlight example ]]

Following is my Page.xaml for this example. There was no code needed.

<UserControl x:Class="AnimationSample.Page"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007" 
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" 
    Width="300" Height="150">
  <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">
    <Grid.Triggers>
      <EventTrigger RoutedEvent="Grid.Loaded">
        <EventTrigger.Actions>
          <BeginStoryboard>
            <Storyboard x:Name="CrawlingBorder" RepeatBehavior="Forever">
              <DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetName="rectangle" 
                Storyboard.TargetProperty="(Shape.StrokeDashOffset)" BeginTime="00:00:00">
                <SplineDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:00" Value="0" />
                <SplineDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:00.5000000" Value="5" />
              </DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames>
            </Storyboard>
          </BeginStoryboard>
        </EventTrigger.Actions>
      </EventTrigger>
    </Grid.Triggers>
    <Rectangle Stroke="Green" StrokeThickness="6" StrokeDashArray="3,2" StrokeDashCap="Round" 
               Margin="20" StrokeDashOffset="0" StrokeLineJoin="Round" x:Name="rectangle">
    </Rectangle>
    <TextBlock FontFamily="Lucida
Sans Unicode" FontSize="24" 
               Text="Crawling
Border" FontWeight="Bold" 
               HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" Foreground="#FFDE680A"/>
  </Grid>
</UserControl>

PresentLight - A Silverlight Presentation Written in Silverlight

Matt Casto — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 02:15:26 GMT

I gave a talk at the Central Ohio Day of .NET last Saturday about Silverlight 2. The presentation was written in Silverlight 2 Beta 1 and included examples of functionality built into Silverlight versions 1 and 2, and the beginning steps in creating the presentation itself.

I have much more planned to be added to the presentation, so I created a CodePlex project called PresentLight. I'm hoping that other people will like the idea of giving a presentation in the technology that they're speaking about, and maybe they'll use the framework or even add their own content!

I uploaded a slightly older version than the one I gave at CODoDN to silverlight.live.com, check it out by clicking on the following preview image. The XAP is 14 MB so expect a decent wait for everything to load ... I need to reduce the size. I'll update this post with a better example as soon as I have it available.

Much thanks goes out to Jeff Blankenburg for building the original slide deck that I based this presentation on. Also, I got the idea from David Sleeckx's WPF presentation, which is an excellent way to get an overview of WPF.

Using the Presentation

You can navigate the slides through the menu on the left, or move forward one slide by clicking on the header area. A few of the slides don't have much at first, but clicking in the slide area will show text which was talking points for that part of the presentation. The interactive slides in the middle should be pretty self explanatory - you can modify the XAML in most of the examples to see changes in real time.

The screen shots at the end can be clicked on to view the full size. I wanted to keep the entire presentation in Silverlight, so I was trying to use screen shots instead of jumping into Visual Studio. These slides were taking over an hour each to prepare, because I was trying to give each one a different type of animation. I think they ended up being a little disjointed though - its much more natural to see someone working with the environment than seeing screen shots of some code, then the solution explorer, then XAML. I'm definitely going to have to give more thought to that area.

Plans for the Future

I plan to have the slides stored in data rather than hard coded in the page code behind. I'm going to integrate more examples, such as Isolated Storage, Communications with web services and through sockets, and dynamic languages integrated directly into the slides, like I did with the XAML examples.

Also, I'm going to expand more on some of the user controls that I created as part of the application. I already went into the scrolling textbox control in my last post, so there will be more of that on the way.

Scrolling TextBox in Silverlight 2 Beta 1

Matt Casto — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 14:41:18 GMT

The TextBox control included with Silverlight 2 Beta 1 is a welcome addition. There was no such control in previous versions of Silverlight, including the alpha.

Unfortunately, the TextBox control is very limited at this point. It does not support scrollbars when it's content is larger than it's size. You can "scroll" the next by moving the cursor, but that's just enough to make it functional. Selecting text past what's visible doesn't automatically scroll to the cursor. Also, there's no text wrapping, although setting the AcceptsReturn property to True will allow line breaks in the text.

I wanted to have a text box with a little more functionality for my projects, so I decided to see what I could do. What follows is the simple ScrollingTextBox control that I created. I didn't spend a ton of time on this because I fully expect this "missing" functionality to be included by Beta 2, or at least by the time Silverlight 2 is released.

To build this, I first created a Silverlight application project and added a Silverlight control called ScrollingTextBox.

<UserControl x:Class="PresentLight.ScrollingTextBox" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"> <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot"> <ScrollViewer x:Name="sv" HorizontalScrollBarVisibility="Auto" VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Auto"> <TextBlock x:Name="hiddenTextBlock" Opacity="0" /> <TextBox x:Name="tb" AcceptsReturn="True" TextChanged="tb_TextChanged" /> </ScrollViewer> </Grid> </UserControl>

The internal TextBlock control is only there to serve as a way to get the actual size of the text. TextBlock controls will automatically resize to fit their contents, so if I keep it's text the same as the internal textbox control, it will resize accordingly. The default value for Width and Height dependency properties in Silverlight is Auto, which causes this resize behavior.

Since the ScrollViewer control automatically set's it's scrollable region to fit it's contents, it will be resized to fit the internal textblock. The internal textbox control will automatically resize to fit it's container, since I haven't set any width or height on it.

Then I added a dependency property for setting the control's Text, which takes care of setting the textbox's text value. Finally, I handled the TextChanged event on the internal TextBox control to resize based on my internal TextBlock's size.

using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; namespace PresentLight
{ public partial class ScrollingTextBox
: UserControl { public string Text
{ get { return (string)GetValue(TextProperty);
} set { SetValue(TextProperty, value); tb.Text = value;
} } public static readonly DependencyProperty
TextProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("Text", typeof(string), typeof(ScrollingTextBox), null); public ScrollingTextBox()
{ InitializeComponent(); } private void tb_TextChanged(object sender,
TextChangedEventArgs e) { if (hiddenTextBlock != null)
{ hiddenTextBlock.Text = tb.Text; tb.Width = hiddenTextBlock.ActualWidth; tb.Height
= hiddenTextBlock.ActualHeight; } } } }

The result is a marginally better control. There are a lot of possible improvements for me to make, such as possibly handing the selection changed event on the textbox to scroll the ScrollViewer to the cursor's position. That will have to wait for a future post.

Silverlight Templates Tip

Matt Casto — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 22:45:08 GMT

I haven't been posting much lately because I've been very busy preparing for my session at the Central Ohio Day of .NET. I'm creating a presentation about Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1, but with a twist - the presentation is actually a Silverlight application!

Templates

For the last day or so I've been working on getting my application's main control to use templates to define the interface. This gives me the option to create multiple "skins" for the application.

To accomplish this, I've been referencing two very excellent tutorials by Jesse Liberty and Shawn Burke. But, as usual for me, I ran into a problem that sucked up a ton of time.

The Problem

I was trying to set up my template to include buttons for navigation between slides. I started by building a simple XAML interface for the buttons, like so.

<StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <Button Height="75" Width="75" Margin="0,0,8,0"> <TextBlock Text="First" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" /> </Button> <Button Height="75" Width="75" Margin="0,0,8,0"> <TextBlock Text="Prev" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" /> </Button> <Button Height="75" Width="75" Margin="0,0,8,0"> <TextBlock Text="Next" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" /> </Button> <Button Height="75" Width="75"> <TextBlock Text="Last" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" /> </Button> </StackPanel>

And that looks good enough for this example.

Then I took that same XAML and put it into a template stored in the application resources (in App.xaml).

<Application.Resources> <Style x:Key="TestTemplate" TargetType="pl:Presentation"> <Setter Property="Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate TargetType="pl:Presentation"> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <Button Height="75" Width="75" Margin="0,0,8,0"> <TextBlock Text="First" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" /> </Button> <Button Height="75" Width="75" Margin="0,0,8,0"> <TextBlock Text="Prev" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" /> </Button> <Button Height="75" Width="75" Margin="0,0,8,0"> <TextBlock Text="Next" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" /> </Button> <Button Height="75" Width="75"> <TextBlock Text="Last" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" /> </Button> </StackPanel> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style> </Application.Resources>

And modified my Page.xaml to have my Presentation UserControl class (modeled after Shawn Burke's tutorial) with the template applied as a style.

<local:Presentation x:Name="PresentationControl" Style="{StaticResource
TestTemplate}" />

But running this treated me to a browser window that's stuck loading. My break point in OnApplyTemplate in my Presentation class never got hit. Pausing Visual Studio didn't tell me anything, so I knew it wasn't stuck in a loop. This had me stuck for several hours.

The Solution

What I eventually found was that certain things that are perfectly acceptable XAML in a user control won't work in a template. Furthermore, if Silverlight encounters these elements in the template it just hangs.

The problem XAML was the buttons. Instead of including your actual buttons in your template, you should instead create a separate template for the buttons, and reference that as your button style.

<Style x:Key="TestButton" TargetType="Button"> <Setter Property="Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate TargetType="Button"> <Button Width="75" Height="75"> <Button.Content> <ContentPresenter Content="{TemplateBinding
Content}" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" /> </Button.Content> </Button> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style>

Then modify the previous template to use the new button template.

<Application.Resources> <Style x:Key="TestTemplate" TargetType="pl:Presentation"> <Setter Property="Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate TargetType="pl:Presentation"> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <Button x:Name="FirstButtonElement" Content="First" Style="{StaticResource
TestButton}" Margin="0,0,8,0" /> <Button x:Name="PreviousButtonElement" Content="Prev" Style="{StaticResource
TestButton}" Margin="0,0,8,0" /> <Button x:Name="NextButtonElement" Content="Next" Style="{StaticResource
TestButton}" Margin="0,0,8,0" /> <Button x:Name="LastButtonElement" Content="Last" Style="{StaticResource
TestButton}" /> </StackPanel> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style> </Application.Resources>

Finally, this works. It looks the same, but now I can take the template and make it look much nicer if I want.

Hopefully this tip will help others working on templating in Silverlight avoid the pitfalls I ran into.

Vista Programs and Features

Matt Casto — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 03:19:08 GMT

In Windows XP's Add/Remove Programs you get information about installed applications such as copyright, version, last run, etc. At first glance this information appears to be gone in Windows Vista's Programs and Features.

Where'd the Program Information Go?

I was recently trying to figure out the version of Silverlight that I have installed, but selecting the item from Programs and Features doesn't tell me anything. Also, clicking Uninstall immediately starts the uninstallation without showing me the version, and clicking Change didn't do anything at all.

I was thinking to myself, "Microsoft wouldn't just remove this information totally ... that would be stupid," so I spent a little more time poking around and found that you can right click on the column headers, click on More... and get a dialog that allows you to select other columns to display.

The information that used to be available by default in Add/Remove Programs is now displays in these columns. It sucks that it's apparently hidden from view, but I guess it didn't take me too long to find it.

Loading

Another change in Programs and Features is the loading. Add/Remove Programs could take a long time to display, but once it did you had everything available. Programs and Features loads installed applications bit by bit, and refreshes the screen. This is annoying if you've started scrolling down or selected an item before its done loading, because the refresh causes things to jump around.

While its nice that it loads a lot quicker in Vista, it almost appears to be worse because it punishes you for trying to use it too quickly. This reminds me of how Windows boots a lot more quickly in XP and Vista, but it does more things after you've logged in so the system really isn't available immediately. If you click on the Start menu too quickly it will go away. Again, punishing you for working too quickly.

I'd like an OS that keeps up with how fast I want to work.