Apress Introducing dot NET 4 0 with Visual Studio 2010_8 ppt

Click the Add New Data Source button on the Data Sources window, and the Choose a Data Source Type window will appear see Figure 15-9... You now have the data source set up and if you lo

Figure 15-8 Improved error handling for user controls

Static Resource and Designer Fix

Previously, if a static resource was declared in app.xaml, you could not use it in the designer In VS2010, you can

Drag-and-Drop Data Binding

I’m not a big fan of drag-and-drop data binding and I think it’s fair to say that most programmers will rightly scorn such functionality However, this type of feature can be very useful for quickly putting together simple data entry forms and prototyping applications

VS2010 includes new functionality to easily create data forms and creates some pretty clean XAML

It seems likely that Microsoft might have brought in this feature to encourage some winforms developers

to move over

You will now learn about this feature by creating a simple master detail form

1 Select Data  Show Data Sources

2 Click the Add New Data Source button on the Data Sources window, and the Choose a Data Source Type window will appear (see Figure 15-9)

Figure 15-9 Choose a Data Source Type dialog

3 Select Database and then click Next The Choose a Database Model screen will appear (see

Figure 15-10)

Figure 15-10 Choose a Database Model dialog

4 Select Dataset (you could also use an entity data model for this feature) and then click Next

5 In the next screen, select the connection to the example database connection (or create it if you haven’t already) and then click Next

6 A new screen (similar to Figure 15-11) will now appear, allowing you to select the objects you want to use

Figure 15-11 Choose your poison (sorry) database objects

7 Select the Tables node to select all the tables and change the dataset name to Chapter15Dataset before clicking Finish

8 You now have the data source set up and if you look over to the Data Sources window (see Figure 15-12), you will see all the tables and their fields

Figure 15-12 Data Sources window after configuring the data source

9 You will now create a data grid to show all the films You don’t want the field FilmID to appear,

so click the FilmID beneath the Film table node A drop-down menu will then appear, allowing you to select different types of UI to be generated for the field In this case, you don’t want it to appear, so select None

10 Now drag the Film table node onto the designer surface to create a DataGrid of films (see Figure 15-13) If you run your project now, you will find a fully working DataGrid However, you’re not done yet; VS2010 also supports the ability to easily create master detail forms

Figure 15-13 Data grid linked to Data source

11 You will now create a details panel to show more details of the film Click FilmID (beneath the Film node) and change the type to Textbox

12 Now click the Film node itself and on the drop-down menu change it to Details before dragging

it to the right of the data grid (you might want to reposition the grid)

13 You also want to display all the film showings, so click the FilmShowing node and change the

drop-down menu to List, and then drag it to the page beneath the grid

14 Now press F5 to run your application and you will have a fully functional master details view

similar to Figure 15-14

Figure 15-14 The final product of the drag-and-drop binding

Improved XAML Intellisense

XAML Intellisense has been tweaked Now when you enter the curly bracket for a binding expression, Intellisense will add the other curly bracket for you and pop up a dialog with available options (see Figure 15-15) It seems a shame the team didn’t go further with this feature and show you different objects you could bind to

Figure 15-15 Improved XAML intellisense

New Controls

WPF 4.0 now contains the DataGrid, Calendar, and DatePicker controls that were previously available as part of the WPF toolkit Microsoft says that these controls are nearly 100 percent compatible with their Silverlight relations Figure 15-16 shows the new Calendar and DatePicker controls; Figure 15-17 shows the DataGrid control in action

Figure 15-16 Calendar and DatePicker controls

Figure 15-17 DataGrid control

The easiest way to create these controls is to drag them from the toolbox or add them manually with the following XAML:

<Calendar></Calendar>

<DatePicker/>

<DataGrid></DataGrid>

Ribbon Control and Bag O’Tricks

Microsoft says that shortly after the release of VS2010 it will introduce a new WPF Ribbon control The Ribbon control could work particularly well in conjunction with the new touchscreen APIs A CTP of the Ribbon control is available at http://wpf.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=29117 Microsoft will also be making an out-of-band release that will contain the following controls under the collection name “Bag O’Tricks” (sorry, no information is available at time of writing, although judging by the control names you can have a pretty good guess at what they do):

Jump Lists

Jump lists, which allow you to easily perform common tasks, are activated by right-clicking an

application on the task bar Figure 15-18 shows the jump list for Windows Live Messenger

Figure 15-18 Jump list in Windows 7

Like most things in WPF/Silverlight, jump lists can be created programmatically and declaratively The following code shows how to create a jump list to open Internet Explorer and Notepad that you

would define in your MainWindow.xaml:

using System.Windows.Shell;

JumpList appJumpList = new JumpList();

//Configure a JumpTask

JumpTask jumpTask1 = new JumpTask();

jumpTask1.ApplicationPath = @"C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe";

jumpTask1.IconResourcePath = @"C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe";

jumpTask1.Title = "IE";

jumpTask1.Description = "Open IE";

JumpTask jumpTask2 = new JumpTask();

Figure 15-19 IE indicating download progress

WPF 4.0 Windows 7 task bar APIs give you control over the following:

• Progress bar overlay (refer to Figure 15-19)

• Icon overlay through the Overlay property (e.g., a small picture)

• Thumbnail window (a window that pops up showing a miniview of the

application's window) Note that you can pick which bit of the window is shown

using the ThumbnailClipMargin property

Let’s take a look at how to work with the progress bar The progress bar allows you to specify a

double value between 0 and 1 to indicate your application's progress with the ProgressValue property You can also indicate different types of status by specifying the ProgressState property This has five

different settings that change the color of the bar:

You will now see how to work with this by setting a progress bar at 50% for the application:

1 Create a new WPF application called Chapter15.ProgressBar

2 Open MainWindow.xaml.cs and add the following using statement:

Multitouch support is Windows 7 only and is enabled by setting the IsManipulationEnabled

property on an element to true and then handling the various events that the APIs expose It's worth noting that multitouch functionality is compatible with Surface SDK 2.0 (the world’s most expensive but cool table)

ContentElement, UIElement, and UIElement3D elements support the following events:

• PreviewTouchDown

• TouchDown

• PreviewTouchMove

• TouchMove

Besides simple touch-related events WPF4.0 also supports various gestures You can restrict the

manipulations that can be performed in the ManipulationStarted event by specifying the

Besides the very welcome new Binding window in VS2010, there are a number of other changes in the

exciting world of binding

Run.text

Run.text is now a dependency property, which means you can now bind to it (one way) unlike previous releases of WPF

Dynamic Binding Support

WPF4.0 supports binding to properties implementing the IDynamicMetaObjectProvider interface such as ExpandoObject and anything inheriting from DynamicObject ( (see Chapter 3)

Input Bindings Now Support Bindings

In previous releases of WPF, it was quite tricky to set binding to input keys using the InputBinding class This was because the Command property was not a dependency property and also didn’t inherit the parent's data context This could make certain scenarios such as implementing the MVVM pattern difficult

This is resolved in WPF 4.0 InputBinding, MouseBinding, and KeyBinding now inherit from Freezable and various related properties are now made dependency properties This should then allow you to write input binding XAML such as the following:

TextOptions.TextFormattingMode

TextFormatting mode allows you to set the text metrics that WPF will use for formatting text

TextFormatting mode has two settings:

• Ideal (as per previous versions)

• Display (ensures that every glyph’s position and width is not fractional, which is

very similar to how the GDI renders text)

The following code demonstrates setting text to use the Display setting:

<TextBlock TextOptions.TextFormattingMode="Display">

Hello I am using new Display mode formatting

</TextBlock>

Setting text to Display mode will in many cases make the text look darker and clearer In Figure

15-20 the first paragraph uses the old Ideal setting; the second uses the new Display setting (yes, the difference is subtle, especially in print, but try it for yourself)

Figure 15-20 Display mode property

Ideal mode works well for situations when you have large fonts or perform transformations/zoom into the text but can look a bit blurry at small font sizes In these cases you would probably be better off using the Display setting

TextOptions.TextRenderingMode

The TextRendering setting, which allows you to control how text is anti-aliased, has four settings:

• Auto (uses clear type unless disabled)

• Aliased (disables anti-aliasing)

• Grayscale (uses grayscale anti-aliasing)

• Cleartype (uses clear type anti-aliasing)

The following code shows how to apply the Grayscale rendering mode:

<TextBlock TextOptions.TextRenderingMode="Grayscale">

I am rendered using Grayscale

</TextBlock>

Figure 15-21 shows how these settings effect the output

Figure 15-21 Demonstration of TextRendering setting

Microsoft recommends that for most scenarios Auto is the best setting to use because it takes advantage of ClearType where available

RenderOptions.ClearTypeHint

In some rendering situations (such as rendering on transparent areas), ClearType functionality will be disabled and Grayscale rendering will be used This can result in text that is not as sharp as it could be WPF 4.0 contains a new option called ClearTypeHint to force applications to utilize ClearType The following code illustrates how to apply this to a TextBlock:

<TextBlock RenderOptions.ClearTypeHint="Enabled">

I will use cleartype

</TextBlock>

East Asian Bitmap font support

Some non-English alphabet characters can be quite complex (think Chinese glyphs), and when rendered

at smaller sizes can appear very blurry using vector transformations WPF now uses bitmaps for smaller text size (if available) which can result in crisper text Microsoft say this feature is supported for the following languages and fonts such as:

• Japanese (MS Gothic)

• Korean (Gulium)

• Korean (Batang)

• Traditional Chinese (MingLiu)

• Simplified Chinese (SimSun)

by forcing the layout to use whole pixel values only UseLayoutRouting is now supported in WPF Using this feature can result in crisper images and layouts, but your layout might not be pixel perfect This XAML demonstrates how to use this property:

<Grid UseLayoutRounding="True" >

</Grid>

Cached Composition

Arguably one of the best additions to WPF 4.0 is cached composition, that allows you to cache any part

of the visual tree Complex effects can take time to render, which results in a jerky experience for your users and uses vast amounts of CPU and memory WPF 4.0 allows you to cache elements as a bitmap,

reducing this rendering time and resource usage with the new BitmapCache and BitmapCacheBrushes

classes The BitmapCacheBrushes class is used when you will reuse the same content multiple times

Cached composition supports dirty regions, so it is clever enough to re-render only the parts that

have changed Re-rendering can occur when WPF detects the visual tree changes or any cache-related

properties are modified Note that the maximum dimensions the bitmap cache supports are 2048 by

myCanvas.CacheMode = new BitmapCache();

And turned off with the following code:

myCanvas.CacheMode = null;

Animation Easing

WPF contains new effects for creating nonlinear movements using complex mathematical formulas to produce effects such as bouncy spring animations You will look at how to utilize these in Silverlight 3.0 later in the chapter, but know that WPF 4.0 provides the following effects:

Pixel Shader 3.0 Support

Previous releases of WPF supported Pixel Shaders version 2.0 WPF 4.0 now supports Pixel Shader version 3.0 Note that the hardware the application is running on must also support the Pixel Shader capabilities To query this, use the static methods on the RenderCapability class such as

RenderCapability.IsPixelShaderVersionSupported

Visual State Manager Integration

Visual State Manager (VSM)) allows you to define a set of states for your controls (e.g., normal, mouse over, mouse down) and then define a different look for each of these states VSM will automatically animate the transitions between states; for example, if you have a black button with a mouse down state that highlights it blue, the button can gradually be highlighted blue as the user hovers the mouse In WPF 4.0, the VisualStateManager and related classes are added to the main framework

HTML-XBAP Script Interop

HTML-XBAP applications can use the new BrowserInteropHelper class to interact with the hosting web page BrowserInteropHelper provides full DOM access and can handle DOM events

Full-Trust XBAP Deployment

In previous releases of WPF, it was quite difficult to create a fully trusted XBAP application That changes with this release; XBAP applications that require full trust that are run from intranet or trusted site zones will now give users the ClickOnce elevation prompt This allows users to easily grant the necessary privileges for your application

Client Profile

It is worth mentioning the client profile (a cut-down version of the full NET Framework) aimed at reducing application size and installation time is also used for WPF applications For more information about the client profile, please refer to Chapter 4

Miscellaneous Changes

You have barely touched the surface with all the new functionality available in WPF 4 but4.0 before you leave this area I would like to mention a number of other additions that were made:

• New XAML parser

• Many additions to XAML 2009 language such as support for Generics

• RichTextBox now supports custom dictionaries rather than just using the

OS-provided dictionary

(http://blogs.msdn.com/text/archive/2009/10/02/custom-dictionaries.aspx)

• Text selection can be customized for TextBox, RichTextBox,

FlowDocumentPageViewer, FlowDocumentScrollViewer, FlowDocumentReader, and

PasswordBox with the new Selection Brush API

• Many changes to API and refactoring of XamlSchemaContext for performance

improvements

• System.Xaml.dll no longer has a dependency on WindowsBase.dll

• The same XAML stack is utilized by WCF, WF, and WPF

• Performance optimizations in Baml2006Reader class

• New class XamlXmlReader

• Improved localization support

• Baml2006Writer class might be available with this release, which could potentially

allow the obfuscation of BAML

Silverlight 3.0

Silverlight developers are in for a treat with the latest version of Silverlight which offers the ability to run your applications offline, deep linking for content and much more

NOTE This chapter assumes a basic knowledge of Silverlight and WPF If you haven’t used Silverlight before

you might want to take a look at Chapter 14 where I introduce Silverlight

Upgrading from Silverlight 2

Before you look at the new changes in Silverlight 3.0, note that upgrading can potentially break existing applications This URL lists breaking changes: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-

providing a very easy way to create cross-platform NET applications

Creating an Offline Application

To enable your Silverlight applications to run offline is very easy and involves making a simple change to the AppManifest file Try it now:

1 Create a new Silverlight application called Chapter15.Offline

2 Add some content (e.g., an image)

3 Open the project properties (see Figure 15-22)

Figure 15-22 Enabling offline application in project properties

4 Check the box marked “Enable running application outside of browser”

5 Click the Out-of-Browser Settings button and note that you can set properties such as images, window size, and application title

6 Press F5 to run your Silverlight project and then right-click the Silverlight app The Silverlight menu will open up

7 Select the “Install Chapter15.Offline Application onto this computer” option (see Figure 15-23)

Figure 15-23 Installing a Silverlight application onto the computer

8 Silverlight will then ask you to confirm where you want to place shortcuts to your application: Start menu and/or Desktop (see Figure 15-24)

Figure 15-24 Offline Silverlight application

9 Check both the Start menu and Desktop options

10 Close the browser

11 Now click one of the short cuts that has been created, and your application will load up running offline (see Figure 15-25):

Figure 15-25 Running a silverlight app offline

Uninstalling Offline Silverlight Applications

If you want to uninstall an offline Silverlight application, simply right-click the window when it is running locally and select the “Remove this application” option

Detaching Manually

You probably don’t want to explain these steps to end users, so the Silverlight API contains an

Application.Current.Install()method that performs the same functionality

Application.Current.Install() method returns a Boolean value indicating whether the detachment was possible or not

Retrieving Attachment State

To query whether your application is running online in a browser or detached, use the

Application.Current.IsRunningOutOfBrowser method

Detecting Connection Status

Now that you have the ability to run applications offline, it is very useful to be able to determine whether the user is connected to the Internet This can be accomplished through the GetIsNetworkAvailable

method that returns true if the user is connected:

System.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterface.GetIsNetworkAvailable()

CAUTION If the user has chosen to work in offline mode, this method will still return true

You also have the ability to monitor network address changes through the NetworkAddressChanged event:

System.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkChange.NetworkAddressChanged()

Autoupdate

When offline applications are run, Silverlight automatically checks to see whether a later version is

available If it is, it is downloaded

Deep Linking and Browser History

A major problem with Silverlight applications is that you cannot directly link to content within the

application in the same way you can with web pages This makes it difficult for users to share or

bookmark content and makes search engine indexing impossible Silverlight 3.0 attempts to solve this

issue by making use of HTML bookmark syntax in your application's URL

Navigation Application

Navigation Application is a new type of project in Silverlight 3.0 If you say Navigation Application

quickly it sounds like gangsta rap, argued Silverlight MVP Chris Hay, and he was right But that doesn’t have much to do with anything, so let’s take a look at Navigation Application now:

1 Create a new Silverlight Navigation Application project called

move around your applications

Figure 15-26 Default Navigation Application

Local Connections

Some page designs utilize two separate Silverlight controls and need a way to pass information between them Previously, this could only be accomplished using the HTML DOM methods Silverlight 3.0 makes this much easier with the local connection API Let’s create a simple example and send some text from one Silverlight control to another:

1 Open Visual Studio and create a new Silverlight application called Chapter15.Sender

2 Add another Silverlight application to the solution called Chapter15.Receiver (opt not to create another web hosting project)

3 Open Chapter15.SenderTestPage.aspx

4 You want to display the Chapter15.Receiver project on the same page, so add another

Silverlight control beneath the existing one by copying the object block and modifying the source parameter to display the Chapter15.Receiver project.xap file:

<object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="100%" height="100%">

<param name="source" value="ClientBin/Chapter15.Receiver.xap"/>

<param name="onError" value="onSilverlightError" />

<param name="background" value="white" />

<param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="3.0.40818.0" />

<param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" />

5 Open MainPage.xaml in the sender project and add a button with the following XAML:

<Button x:Name="cmdSendMessage" Content="Send Message" Width="200"

Height="200"></Button>

6 Open MainPage.xaml.cs in the sender project and import the following namespace:

using System.Windows.Messaging;

7 Amend the code in MainMenu.xaml.cs to the following:

public partial class MainPage : UserControl