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!
Related
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 ]
I'm not sure that's the right way to say it, but what I want is to for my wpf main window to have it's own bar that will behave like a taskbar, and any children windows that will be open from the main one will be placed in that bar in a similar way like the taskbar works in windows - a rectangle showing the window name for example, on click it opens you the window, if you click minimize it will minimize it to the bar, and with some option, to get it out of the main window and move it to the real windows taskbar, with another option for putting it back in. The problem is I don't know if this is even possible, and I don't know the name of such an element, so if anyone can give me any tips I'll be really thankful.
I worked on an application years ago (.NET 3.0: first WPF release!) that did exactly that. We ran into a lot of issues getting it to work, but we were pretty successful in the end. One thing we didn't support was moving it to the Windows taskbar.
The best option would be to set an attached property on each Window. This would register a Window with your custom taskbar, so if you wanted to move the Window out of your custom bar, you'd set the property to false. Setting the property to true would add it to the collection of application windows, as well as register event handlers to track the state of the Window.
One of the major pain points for us was getting the Window animations correct. If you're not running in XP, this probably less of an issue, as the animations in Vista (or is it 7?) and above aren't really showing where a Window is going on minimize. In the end, we had to do a lot of low level Win32 (p/Invoke) work for this.
Take a look at AvalonDock and WPF MDI:
http://avalondock.codeplex.com/
http://wpfmdi.codeplex.com/
Is it possible to drag an HTML 5 object, e.g. an <a draggable="true">, into a Silverlight 4 control and accept it? We've attempted to build a simple prototype using an HTML 5 example and a trivial Silverlight control but the cursor changes to the no-entry sign whenever we hover over the Silverlight control. We do, however, get drag entry events firing in Silverlight.
Our control happily accepts files dragged from the desktop as expected. We think we've got the HTML 5 drag events set up correctly, and I can possibly get our test published somewhere in case that will help. We've successfully implemented dragging inside a Silverlight control but we now need to integrate with non-Silverlight page components.
Is this actually possible to set up or are we just doing something wrong? Thanks for any advice!
Silverlight Drag drop from external sources currently supports only file lists.
You may however be able to get the <object> tag hosting the Silverlight plugin to respond to a dragging. If so you can use the Silveright HTML Bridge to handle these DOM events. Its a bit of a long shot though.
Short answer, as Anthony says is No.
You can emulate the functionality by using the
the drag entry event and mouse button up event, then create a silverlight control that most closely matches the HTML one you were dragging, and hide the original html control (which should snap back to its original position)...
Its a little messy, but it works...
Incidently, as far as i'm aware, dragging between 2 silverlight instances on the same page would require a similar technique...
Silverlight is awesome, most of my application users are giving positive feedback about silverlight. However some of the users are not able to live without copy/paste functionality. They are very much used to copy/paste functionality provided by HTML page out of the box.
How can I implement such a context menu as well as copy/paste functionality?
PS: Windows only solution is fine too.
Aside from using TextBox with IsReadOnly=true, you'll have a pretty hard time trying to simulate selection and copy/paste in a TextBlock. I would identify the areas they wish to copy/paste the most and use TextBox's there. You could even remove the border and make a transparent background and it should look nearly identical to adjacent TextBlock's.
If you do that then you will get the selection and copy functionality provided by TextBox and it works across browsers.
Otherwise you will need to go through the browser's DOM to put stuff on the clipboard and that will be a pain because of cross-browser concerns. Silverlight 4 adds a Clipboard API if you're able to start development with a beta version.
As Josh has answered, style a TextBox to look like a TextBlock. In terms of copy and paste:
Assuming the users aren't content with just CTRL+C, CTRL+X or CTRL+V - you can now access the clipboard in Silverlight 4:
string content = Clipboard.GetText();
Clipboard.SetText("hello world");
A context menu can be done in various ways, and in Silverlight 4 it is actually properly supported cross browser instead of just IE. You could do it with a Popup or a ChildWindow or just use one from the Vectorlight library:
This open source project on Codeplex contains a demo that does just that and much more:
http://sl4popupmenu.codeplex.com/
When I have 2 apps open and one has the focus but I want to execute a command in the other app, it requires a click to regain focus and another to execute the command. Is there some good reason why I couldn't take focus on MouseOver? I'm working with a WPF app if that is pertinent. TIA
EDIT: Oddly enough the MouseOvers work without focus.
I would not recommend doing this. This is not a standard way of working in Windows, so you will confuse your users. People are used to clicking into an application (or tabbing) to provide focus.
However, this is a configurable setting via the Accessability Tools in Windows. It can be enabled by choosing "Activate a window by hovering over it with the mouse" globally. Let your users specify this behavior if they want it.
The setting is configurable at a system-wide level. You should never ever override the user's current setting regarding this.
MS Windows Vista -- focus follows mouse (There's also a link on how to do it on XP.)
Edit: Normally, you can click a button on a form and both bring focus to the window and click it at the same time. The origins of the current setting "eating" the initial mouse click that brings focus to a window started as a fix to a bug in the Ribbon UI. The discussion is somewhere in this video: The Story of the Ribbon. Sorry I can't narrow it down more than that, but at least the video is a great insight and work watching - maybe you can send a message to Jensen Harris if you need a faster answer.
Edit 2: I just added a button to a WPF window, and I'm able to click it as long as I can see it - whether or not the window has focus.
You can take focus on MouseOver manually