Over the weekend, I pieced together a little application that will help us visualize the incoming Wiimote data in a way that would help understand the raw data points a little better as well as help out as we head toward our ultimate goal of multi-point WPF application development. This is what I came up with.
Disclaimer: The source code at this point is a mess. While the interface is all done in XAML and is very WPF, the code-behind is a hacked together mish-mash. I will at some point go back and restructure the code-behind to take advantage of the INotifyPropertyChanged interface. When I do that, I’ll post on it and we’ll see another example of why WPF is so freaking cool.
OK, so I’ve taken note of multi-point WPF a couple times now (both times were in regards to Rick Barraza’s Cynergy demo) and I started noticing that people are really interested in this. So I decided to take some time to create a couple tutorials on creating multi-point interfaces in WPF.
A point of note: I am not a programmer. I am a designer. This means that whatever code I post will probably be a mess. But it also means that if I can make something work in WPF, anyone can.
The first question we need to address is how to pull multi-point interaction data into your system. You could, of course, buy one of these. I don’t have that kind of money, so I decided to try my hand at the poor man’s multi-point: the ever useful Wiimote controller for the Nintendo Wii.
In this post, we’ll go over how exactly to connect your Wii controller to your computer via Bluetooth. (I’m using Vista. Could be different for XP, but I haven’t tried.)
First, open up your Control Panel and double click on “Bluetooth Devices”
Please Read: Strangely, when you do a Google search for “wpf” and “listview”, this is one of the top links. This is odd because this particular post is kind of an advanced tutorial. If you’re looking for more general information on styling the wpf listview, check out this post. It is probably much closer to what you’re looking for.
This is a bit of an advanced tutorial. I’m putting it up because I just figured out how to do it and I want to share. You can also download the project files for this tutorial (in zip format… requires .Net 3.5).
Recently, I received from my user experience designers a wireframe that looked something like this:
As you can see, there are embedded categories (categories within categories) here. I considered many solutions (hacks), but I found that a deeper understanding of the ListView and how it works would allow me to resolve this issue very simply (and without even touching the code behind). Read the rest of this entry »
