I am trying to hit test in Silverlight applications to find the elements under the mouse cursor.
Normally VisualTreeHelper.FindElementsInHostCoordinates works for this. If there is a Popup open I need to pass in the popup to the hit testing method. If there are multiple popups open, I need to determine the correct (topmost) popup to pass in.
Is there any reliable way to determine which Popup is topmost? I'm doing this in an assembly that may be loaded after the Popups have been opened, so I can't rely on tracking the order in which they are opened.
Thanks for any assistance.
It looks like the new VisualTreeHelper.GetOpenPopups call returns the open Popups in order from bottom to top (or least recently to most recently opened?). So that does what I need.
Posting this answer in case anyone else runs into the same issue.
Related
My specific issue is not being able to close a WPF Popup/Flyout when anything on the Taskbar is clicked. I have been able handle its closing from just about any other object, but the Taskbar remains a mystery.
I have looked into various ways to get Taskbar information (such as SHAppBarMessage), but it seems I can only know two specific states about the Taskbar, neither of which help me.
Does anyone have ideas?
The Window.Deactivated event is triggered by clicking the taskbar.
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/
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!
Hey, I just got started designing dialog boxes and windows forms, and I had a basic question.
When you use something like a windows installer, it has a next button, and when you click it the dialog completely changes layout in moving on to the next step. My question is, is this done by loading a completely new dialog box and getting rid of the previous one. Or is there some way of making a dialog with multiple pages/states (not sure what to call them).
Thanks in advance for any help.
Wizards are usually made using the property sheet control from the Common Controls library. They do not create a new dialog, but use something similar to tab pages instead.
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