Posts Tagged ‘Data Binding’
February 27th, 2008
Sorry for the extended absence… I’m been working myself to the bone on the Veracity submission to the Show Off at MIX08. We’ll have some really kicking stuff to play around with at the Open Space… you should drop by and say hi. I look something like this:
At least I look like that at 1:30 AM.
OK, so I felt the need to pipe up at this ungodly hour with a public service announcement about events and databinding. I just spent a good hour trying to figure out a workaround for this problem. I had a method being called on my “IsVisibleChanged” event. I was planning on take that item and performing some code-behind logic based on the databound Canvas.Left and Canvas.Top properties.
WPF put the smack-down on that action. The data binding wouldn’t update before the event was called. And I couldn’t make it. Not without some kind of Invoke… which, I must admit, scares the ever-loving crap out of me, so I didn’t try… also because I didn’t know how to use it.
My advice if your databinding won’t update? Find some way of going to the data itself. If you’re binding to something in the XAML, you should be able to find the object you’re binding to in the code as well. Just go straight to the source.
Anyone have a better idea or suggestion? I’m totally open to hearing it.
February 4th, 2008
I’ve been spending the past several days fighting with the ComboBox in an attempt to make it so something very simple: Wrap text inside the combo box. I’ve finally figured it out, so I thought I’d share.
OK, first of all, make sure that your ComboBox is hooked up to something, even if that something is some random RSS feed. I have a post that can help you with that over here. Bind your comboBox to the “Items” part of the New York Times RSS feed.
You need to do this because, if you do not, you will have to set the same data template to every single ComboBoxItem that you add to the ComboBox. And that’s just no fun.
Starting out, your ComboBox should look something like this:
Right click on your ComboBox and select “Edit Other Templates -> Edit Generated Items (ItemTemplate)-> Create Empty…” Give your new data template a name and Blend will take you into the Data Template design.
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January 31st, 2008
OK, I hope no one is using my last post as an example of what you should be doing when interfacing the Wiimote with WPF. Because it was completely hack-tastic.
Instead, use my new WPF/Wii library. It uses the WPF INotifyPropertyChanged interface to act as an interface so that we can bind the Wiimote data directly to the XAML. More on that in a little bit, but first…
In this post, we’ll walk through creating a basic multi-point capable app that uses the Wiimote as an input device. What is really unique about this post is the fact that we’re going to do this in a way that requires absolutely no code whatsoever on your part.
That’s right. No code. At all. Zero knowledge of C# required.
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December 13th, 2007
When I’m doing the initial design for a project (while the developers are working on silly things like data validation and security), I often find myself in need of data so that I can see my project in action. The developers, of course, have no interest in conjuring up test data at that phase in the project, so I started using RSS feeds as data sources for my initial designs.
Not all RSS feeds are equal in the eyes of Blend. I use one of the New York Times RSS feeds, which always work flawlessly.
So we’re looking at the listview/listbox/whatever in our project. Right click on it (in the composition or in the Objects and Timeline pane, it doesn’t matter) and select the “Bind ItemsSource to Data”.
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