I am developing the application which consists of two pages. The first page is a menu where you can navigat to the second page which is some sort of a map. This application supposes to be run on Windows Phone 7 and Silverligth 4. Everything is built up on the MVVM pattern. For S4 I am using Unity, for WP7 I am creating very simply IoC container.
Getting to the bottom of the matter, I need to provide this application with a common navigation system. I know that S4 supports the new interface INavigationContentLoader which allows us to use our own content loader. Unfortunately, this does not work for WP7.
I am also thinking about taking advantage of the Shell/Frame approach. Basically we have a shell or a frame control with a replaceable content. The navigation in this case is about replacing content. But I am afraid that this solution won't work properly for WP7, since the BACK button will close the app instead of stepping back to the previous page.
Guys, do you have other ideas? What solution do you have? I want to stress that this solution should be consistent with MVVM.
Best regards Jarek
For such a small simple app I'd create my own wrapper around selecting the navigation mode dependent upon the platform.
Something like:
void MyNavigate(uri page)
{
#IFDEF WINDOWS_PHONE
NavigationService.Navigate(page);
#ELSEIF
NavigateTo(page); // or whatever is appropriate to your Silverlight 4 app
#ENDIF
}
Related
I`ve a legacy winform desktop app that works perfectly with mouse and keyboard. It has some selfmade controls that involve the creation of threads and so on, for example the longer a button is pushed the faster a number is incremented.
The application also uses a win32 dll. Now, the client wants that application to be touch enabled and run it in a tablet, which also means resizing and rotation capabilities.
My question is, which is the better way to get that application touch enabled and responsive design?
I can try to modify the existing winform, but I think it will be lot of work with poor results. I can also migrate to WPF and reuse the c# code, but I might have trouble with the keyboard, as I have not found a good way to show the keyboard and maintain the whole app on the screen. Or I can migrate to windows store app, but with the problem of that win32 dll, that I`m not sure it could be migrated.
The winform application is multilingual so creating a keyboard is not a valid option.
If the target is touch screen, then for sure the best option would be a Windows Store App, although there are several limitations.
If you are not going to publish this application in Windows Store, then you should be able to use all WinAPI functions. (I'm not sure what is win32.dll - if it's your own dll then it can be a problem).
Well ... at the risk of sounding like I really don't know anything about programming, I have a question about controls in Silverlight 5.
I have an OOB App that I am working with, but I need to add the User Menus (File, Edit, etc.) that are normally seen at the top of all apps. There used to be a control in VS (the Menu control) that was easily configurable. What is the control used to create the User Menus in Silverlight 5? The Context Menu is not what I am asking about. That is the right mouse click menu ... so that's not the answer ...
Please, understand my problem. It's been since Silverlight 2 since I worked in Silverlight. I appreciate any information you kind folks would be willing to provide.
There is no such thing available directly from Microsoft (meaning it's neither built-in or present in the Silverlight Toolkit).
You will have to use third-party controls such as DevExpress or Telerik.
EDIT: Some more advice in response to your comment.
Another possibility is to create UIs from scratch. There are two forms of UIs that I found inspiring lately, both of which don't use any ribbons or drop-down menues at all. The first is to use "Windows 8"-like dashboards instead of traditional menues, the other is the Windows Azure Management Portal (a web application).
I don't use traditional UI frameworks for menues myself, but mostly because I don't like those approaches and I'm picky with how user interfaces should work and look like.
But obviously you have to make a serious time investment to go new ways. And it will heavily depend on your application what approach makes sense.
Here's one simple approach that could work in a number of cases, I used it for a database application (I call it the Windows-Phone-7/8 approach):
The screen is divided into the "page" area and information bars. The information bars contain no menues, just who's logged on, a back-button, a home-button, and context-sensitive buttons depending on what's in the view. So basically it behaves like a web browser and you navigate through the app by clicking on "links" (buttons that take you elsewhere).
There's only one page area, so no windows and no popups. I've gone to the extreme of making even dialog windows to be pages.
Now you need menues. You do that with "dashboards", ie. pages that present some overview stuff and buttons that lead to the other areas of your application.
Although you could have action buttons like save or delete on the page itself, I put them in the bottom bar (but they are still dependent on the page your on) - that is exactly how it works in Windows Phone 7/8.
One last advice: The real effort is usually not in the menus anyway. Beside your application logic itself, it's a lot of little things like login screen, error handling and how to present error messages (look at the windows azure management portal for how they did that really nicely) and gracefully failing on session timeout. There's also a lot of nuisance on how you manage your data (ria-services, etc.).
So as long as you don't need fancy data grid grouping, rich-text edit or excel-like pivot controls, a toolkit might not help you as much as you'd hope - because they give you only the controls, not the entire UI.
I've searched all over but it seems like no one has figured out a way (or at least written about a way) to add transitions to a ContentControl (or equivalent) in Silverlight for Windows Phone.
I'm using Caliburn Micro, and I have a Screen Conductor that activates different user controls. All I want is a simple slide effect between activations, forward and back. You can do this in WPF but not in SL4WP it seems like.
The other alternative is to switch to using navigation between these views, but then I lose the "master-detail" style view model. I'd be open to an answer that kept my intention but used page navigation instead (since then I could use the Slide transitions from the Windows Phone Toolkit).
It's a step-by-step style conductor, I need to lead the user through a 2-3 step process, allowing them to go back or cancel out, each step using data from the previous.
Are you sure it cannot be done? There are various blog posts and articles on the internet that indicate that the TransitioningContentControl is part of the Silverlight for Window Phone Toolkit.
Note that 'Silverlight' and 'Silverlight for Windows Phone' are different things, so you must download the right toolkit.
Greetings
I've read WPF utilizes DirectX so I'm wondering if it is possible to create a Game Overlay with WPF. I have tried with Winforms or WPF by itself and the transparent forms or windows always cause problems for streaming software thus I'm wondering is it possible to do the following:
Create a WPF application which shows a Window on the desktop with all the options needed for the overlay. Once all the options is filled in you can press Update and the Overlay is created in the game with all the information on it. The WPF app itself won't be visible on the stream. This means all the viewers will not have any trouble with it when the broadcaster changes settings.
More about the overlay
The overlay will be a scoreboard so it will need a set amount of info. For example:
So to sum up my question(s)
Can I make a WPF application which
dynamically creates a DirectX overlay
ingame?
Since it needs to work in DirectX9,
is this project possible to make by a
single dev (me) which has little to
no exp with DirectX?
If it is possible, where should I
start?
Thanks in advance for all your possible insights and replies!
What you want would be possible using D3DImage. It allows you to host any Direct3D content within WPF and also allows you to have overlay with transparency. Here is a simple example.
From your comment above, it sounds like your really trying to inject your overlay (at least from the user's perspective) into Starcraft II. You would almost have to host a copy of the directx buffer.
Also, besides WPF, you might want to look at XNA.
When using silverlight in a browser is there anyway to switch xaml pages? I'm also wondering how to go about using my encryption class I've wrote in c# to validate users in silverlight. Any help would be much appreciate!
If you're using Silverlight 3 Beta then what you're looking for is the Navigation system using the Frame and Page controls. There are lots of tutorials available online for this.
In Silverlight 2 the easiest solution is to replace the RootVisual with a Panel (like Grid or Canvas) and have your own code to switch the child elements (which are usually your own UserControls).
There's a good tutorial available at Flawless Code
We are using Jesse Liberty's method of doing the page switching in SL2. It is explained here. Jesse Liberty SL2 page switching
It also look or feels a lot like how SL3 does it with the Navigation mentioned above.
Caution: If you do this, the back button on the browser will need to be handled - users will exit out of your SL2 app when hitting the back button. SL3 has built in support for handling and responding correctly to the back button.