VS 2012 Coded UI Testing and WPF User Control - wpf

I have an application that uses a UserControl inside of a Window, Coded UI Testing recognizes everything in the Window (buttons, etc.) but inside the UserControl I just get a blue box around the area and cannot select anything inside for recording.
I've been all over google for this issue and I think it has to do with the AutomationPeers (?). Any suggestions would be useful in how to get these elements visible to Coded UI

If the custom control doesn't provide a customized/override version of the OnCreateAutomationPeer, you can't. You need to ask developers to implement automation support for their control.

UPDATE:
My issue was that Coded UI couldn't see past my TabControl (displays different user controls). I followed this solution to create a CustomTabControl and override the OnCreationAutomationPeer() method so that the lower elements could be displayed.
[ click here ]

Related

Is there a SurfacePopup control in Surface 2?

We've been working on an application for the last few months that's aimed at Windows 7 tablet PCs. So we've used the Surface 2 SDK for most controls and it's all touch-happy.
I have noticed recently, though, that one of our custom controls isn't working as it should. This control provides popout menus, and these are achieved through the Popup control. On a developer's laptop, this works fine and the menus vanish when you click away from them. I've noticed, though, that on our test tablet they have a tendency to stay open.
I found that there was a SurfacePopup in the first Surface SDK, but I can't find one in the Surface 2 SDK. Did they get rid of it? Is there a 'best practice' approach?
If there's no simple solution, I may have to go old-school and add a window-sized hidden SurfaceButton below the menu when it appears, that hides itself and the menu when clicked or touched.
Beyond that I've noticed that sometimes the SurfaceScrollViewer within the popups won't work. I'm guessing this is because it's not picking up touch events properly. I tried adding this extension method to the window..
this.EnableSurfaceInput();
..but I get a NullReferenceException on System.Windows.Input.Mouse.get_LeftButton() which bizarrely suggests that it can only enable surface inputs for controls when there's a mouse plugged in.
Any ideas? They'll all be welcomed with open arms!
There's no SurfacePopup in the Surface SDK 2.0, however you can use a normal WPF popup. Then you need to make sure that it receives Touch Events by using the extension method you suggested above on the popup, not the window:
((HwndSource)HwndSource.FromVisual(popup)).EnableSurfaceInput();
Edit: As I just found out, this only works when the popup is initially open. To get it to work when the popup is opened later on, you don't need to use the popup, but the parent of it's child (see this question).
For the benefit of Daniel, and anyone else who needs a solution to this, I'll try to cast my mind back two years and explain how we got this working.
As far as I can remember, the answer was to use an adorner layer instead of a popup. Basically, every WPF control has an adorner layer, which sits above the control's UI stack. By default it contains nothing, but you can add whatever you like to it.
I got this all working by writing a custom control that allows you to place that control, with content, in the XAML and then show and hide it whenever you need to. When it's shown, it moves its contents into the adorner layer of the containing window, and when it's hidden it moves the contents back into the control itself, which is hidden from the user.
Afraid I can't go into any more detail than that, but as far as I can remember this was the ultimate solution; replacing popups (which never quite worked very well) with a custom control that uses the adorner layer.
Hope that helps!

WPF UI detach(pin out) functionality

Am looking to implement a detach and popup UI behaviour in my applcation.
It basically means that I will be displaying say, a stackpanel with lot elements on the right side of my page. And on a button click, I want the stackpanel part to popup(removing its allocated space in the UI) and should be able to move it above the underlying wpf UI.
What am trying to do is that remove the stackpanel from its parent grid on button click and add it as the child of wpf popup control. But I am facing some issues doing this way. However I just want to know whether I am doing it in the correct way or do anyone have a good alternative for implementing this pin out functionality am specified here?
Thanks,
Vinsdeon
How about using this kinda nice control, AvalonDock, which is simulating Visual Studio's dockable components behaviors?
http://avalondock.codeplex.com/
It will spare you the pain of developing such a specific functionality, and will have a great reusability anyway

Can I use the WP7 Panorama control outside of WP7?

I need a WPF control that acts like the Panorama control for Windows Phone 7, but I need it for a desktop application.
It will contain a series of panels (or Panorama Items) that the application will be able to slide through horizontally programmatically.
Also, the content inside the panels not currently displayed on the screen will need to be "lazy loaded". In other words, they should be referenced but not loaded or rendered.
Can I somehow adapt the WP7 Panorama control to do this? Or will I have to develop a custom control from scratch to behave similarly to it?
Thank you!
EDIT:
I could probably use a VirtualizingPanel to implement the lazyload behaviour.
MahApps.Metro while still not super mature does allow for the wp7 Panorama control. Demo of how to use a panorama here. I've played with it a little and while its not the most customizable thing out there it gets the job done. Pretty sweet. Also Sacha Barber (Codeproject Demigod) wrote up an article on making your own. Of which I haven't looked at yet but, the guy usually does awesome work. So I'd check that one out as well.
http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/arielbh/archive/2010/10/21/porting-windows-phone-7-s-panorama-control-to-silverlight-4.aspx gives some clues about how do to this.
It suggests using http://phone.codeplex.com/ as your base and then you can use http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=4b281bde-9b01-4890-b3d4-b3b45ca2c2e4 (Microsoft Surface Manipulations and Inertia Sample for Microsoft Silverlight) to run convert get it to respond to touch.
Seems none exist as far as I can see so far.
This blog has started an attempt at making it, so you could work from there to make your own. Be sure to also check out this page which details the creation of an individual panorama item too.

Multiple Forms in C# Window

I'm trying to build a simple application to test the idea of having multiple forms in one application. For example, in Visual Studio, you have the IDE - design area, and on the right hand side, you have a form called Properties and Solution Explorer
When you click on something in the design area, i.e. Textbox, on the right hand side, the properties for that object selected automatically changes.
I do not want to add the PropertyGrid ontop of the same form where the objects are, it must be independant on its own.
My ultimate goal is to have a 3D viewer/WPF and on the right hand side, a form. When you click in the 3D viewer on a line, or point, the selected object's properties must be displayed in the PropertyGrid
Second to that, I want to be able to dock the forms, or reset to default layout.
Screesnhot:
(properties should be docked inside the main form - not like screenshot)
Example: http://dan.virgesystems.com/images/CPVimage.JPG (Dead Link)
If you decide to do it using WinForms, there's a good C# opensource library for VS-style docking: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dockpanelsuite/
Here's a screenshot of an application using it: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Image:Kosmos.2.0.png
Try encapsulating your viewer and form into user controls. You can use the splitter control or panels to layout the container form as you please. Communication between the user controls can be done through events or direct references.

How to run Google Earth Inside a WPF Control

I’m trying to run Google earth inside WPF but I don’t know how. Basically I have managed to run Google Earth in a Windows Form Control inside a Windows Form, everything was OK.
Trying to do the same thing in WPF, well, give strange result a small Google Earth screen placed anywhere in the form an not inside the User Control I have created, and there is now way to make this Google Earth Control grow, or shrink, when I grow or shrink the WPF Form.
Any help would be appreciated, I really mean any!
If you have a Windows Forms control that already works exactly as you want, you could always use WindowsFormsHost to put that control on your WPF form. That might be the easiest thing to do... or is that what you're already doing that isn't working?
I also wrote an application that placed Google Earth inside a WinForms WebBrowserControl that was based on the more-or-less official example hosted by Google. It worked fine. I struggled to recreate the same application inside a WPF WebBrowserControl. My experience confirms what appears to be the general consensus that the WPF WebBrowserControl is harder to use because it provides less control. (e.g. With the WinForms WebBrowserControl you can use the properties to remove the scroll bar and eliminate the IE security question on startup, but with WPF WebBrowserControl you have to use kludges inside to HTML file loaded to get the same effect.) If you are following the Google GE plugin WinForms example, you have to move the JavaScript callback functions into a separate class because of WPF window cant be a parent of the .Net-COM interop between JavaScript and C#. Maybe the other artifacts you described are due to how you resolved this latter limitation. Before finding this solution, I was tempted to put the WinForms WebBrowser control inside the WPF window, but others have posted of unpleasing side-effects of doing this.

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