WPF Prism and Ribbon samples/tutorials - wpf

I'm looking for a WPF prism with ribbon application samples and tutorials. I have found many that cover prism or ribbon but only a few sources provide any information about implementating those two together in one application. No course code usually in available tough. An example with a few simple modules and a classical ribbon tab control would be perfect for me to start.
Thanks for any help.
Regards,
Enzo.
Edit:
I should add that by combining the two I want to be able to load different modules depending on the ribbon tab selected by user.

You can find some info on a customized region adapter for the WPF Ribbon Preview here.
Regarding the loading of modules on demand in Prism, here is another link to MSDN, covering the topic.

David Veeneman wrote a nice article about Ribbon & Prism on CodeProject
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/ViewSwitchingAppsPrism4.aspx
It includes RegionAdapter for Ribbon .

There is "Southridge Hands-On Labs" on Codeplex (download on WPF futures page). It is quite extensive, but documentation and source code are not in sync (it looks they updated labs source, but not accompanying documentation), so it can be a pain sometimes to get what is going on.
It is based on Microsoft's WPF Ribbon Preview library.
Edit:
I am not aware about any tutorial that covers both. You can check series of videos on Prism and Silverlight by Mike Taulty. There is also source code for application made in last video.
Then you can combine knowledge from Southridge labs and this Prism tutorial.

I ran into a similar problem this weekend and after much reading and searching came up with this code that I posted for review
https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/429/mvvm-wpf-ribbon-v4-with-prism

Related

stacked bar chart in wpf toolkit

can someone guide me on developing stacked bar chart in WPF toolkit. i tried that but didn't find a ready to go solution for this.
or is there any reference for developing a custom control to server the purpose of a stacked bar chart.
thanks
David Anson had a nice blog series on the WPF tool kit and charts, this one discusses the stack bars and should provide a good starting point.
This was a confusing topic to me for a day or so.
David Anson created some cool stacking charts for the Silverlight Toolkit Data Visualization library. The confusing part to me (as a WPF newbie) was that they were not present in the WPF Toolkit Data Visualization library.
In general, the goal seems to be to align the Silverlight Toolkit and the WPF Toolkit. Unfortunately, the current official version of the WPF Toolkit is from early 2010. The stacking charts in the Silverlight Toolkit were released around the same time and so the toolkits have not yet been aligned..
Clear as mud? David Anson was nice enough to provide the WPF source and binaries for the developer version of this toolkit. So, while not officially released, you can still get stacking charts with little effort.
The second problem I had was that once I had this binary referenced, my code compiled correctly but XAML UI designer couldn't recognize any of the new controls and barfed constantly. I resolved this by re-building the developer version of the toolkit to generate .pdb files.
Seems to be that the latest published version of the WPF Toolkit is 3.5 or 3.5.5, depending on where you get it from.
The stacked charts are only available in version 4 of the toolkit, which is available for Silverlight, but not officially for WPF.
If you'll head to this post, you can download the examples he uses (direct link).
Now, here's the beauty: browse to the "Toolkit -> WPF4" folder, and take the dll you'll find there. This is the version 4 toolkit for WPF, which you can then reference in your project, and have access to the stacked barcharts.
Once you got that up and running, just have a look at the code for the stacked bars examples, and work from there.
(Warning: I'm rather unhappy with those examples, since they relay heavily on code behind, and are not MVVM friendly at all, so I had to work around this a bit. It can be done though)
For people still finding this thread: Stacked100 and Stacked Series for Area, Bar, Column, and Line are available in the 4.0 release of the WPF Toolkit.

Is this indictment of DevExpress WPF controls valid and what is a good alternative vendor?

My company is starting a major greenfield development project using DevExpress WPF controls. I just read this critical review of their WPF controls:
[…] DevExpress developers completely misunderstood WPF when they developed their WPF controls. I really cannot impress upon you sufficiently well just how much of a displeasure it is using their controls. I feel absolutely terrible (almost guilty) about talking about a vendor with such negativity, but they have made a serious mistake in their WPF suite, it has been a singular source of the most abject frustration for me in about a decade of developing software.
Do you agree that DevExpress does not understand the WPF paradigm and will cause our developers grief during development and maintenance? Can you suggest an alternate vendor of WPF controls? I'm looking for a vendor with WPF controls that will enhance our application while fitting well with the WPF API, binding and MVVM.
The link (above) to the critical blog post is broken. The original author has stated:
I wrote the original article, and have decided to work with DevExpress in a private capacity after speaking with them so I have regrettably decided to remove the post. Regards, Ira
Abject frustration is EXACTLY what I experienced thanks to DevExpress. I lost hours of my life attempting to simply bind a combo box. The drop-down list at best would only display my ItemsSource class name multiple times. I even posted a StackOverflow question to figure out what I could possibly be doing wrong. Finally on a whim I tried removing this one line of xaml:
devx:ThemeManager.ThemeName="DeepBlue"
Suddenly my problem went away. It was caused by the Developer Express wpf theme DeepBlue. Discovering the problem was a tremendous relief. My company will now be using Telerik WPF controls. My colleagues are quite happy with DevExpress Asp.Net controls. It is only the WPF suite we are avoiding.
I would like to clarify our opinion on usage of our controls in applications built based on the MVVM pattern. At the moment, we are working on a series of examples which should clarify how our controls can be used under different popular MVVM based frameworks (like Prism, MVVM Light and so on). There are a couple of problems in our WPF controls regarding the MVVM pattern and we are trying to eliminate them. However, generally there are no showstoppers that can prevent a developer from using our controls in a MVVM application. Hopefully, our examples, posted on the DevExpress Web Site will convince you in this.
I do not agree completely with the assertion that DevX developers missed the mark on WPF. However, I will say that it appears they may have had a steep learning curve to overcome. Lets face it, WPF is massive. To master it, even out of the box, is a daunting task. I do agree that DevEx controls will not fit into a MVVM pattern, but they do sit quite nicely in a MVP pattern. "Can you suggest an alternate vendor of WPF controls?" No, but I will suggest that you study additional patterns if you are stuck with DevEx.
I have used Syncfusion, Ingragistics, Telerik as well as various smaller libraries and DevExpress is my platform of choice. I find them to be not only super supportive of WPF and MVVM but their tech support has been phenomenal. I actually was mid project in a multi-million dollar project using Syncfusion WPF and found so many bugs in the library that my customer was close to pulling the plug. I switched mid stream to DevEx and they save my bacon. Their controls always seem the most up to date and incorporating the latest trends. I wish they did more Xamarin stuff and some of the other things that Syncfusion does but I would rather have less stuff that actually works than a wide array of stuff that doesn't.

Telerik, Infragistics, XCeed,

I'm looking for a vendor for a grid control for WPF that works nicely together with MVVM; and that allows grouping by dragging the columns. I've been looking around and at first sight it seems that my choice at the moment would be Telerik.
If there are people that have experience with one or more vendors, I would like to hear your opinion.
Thanks!
L
did you try the dataGrid included in WPF .net 4.0?
as MS finally added one, you could first try to use it and see if it suits your needs.
except of course if you are limited (having to use .net prior to v4.0 for instance...)
see there for more info:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-en/library/system.windows.controls.datagrid%28VS.95%29.aspx
The Xceed DataGrid for WPF does support MVVM. You can refer to their product page for more information here and you can also refer to their extensive and online documentation here.
After installation, you are also given many sample applications that are installed on your machine. You can find them here:
C:\Xceed Samples\Xceed DataGrid for WPF Professional Edition vX.X

Is there a document highlighting WPF and Silverlight controls available in the framework?

I'm looking for something like a pdf or anything else that would show a chart of available controls in SL and/or WPF.
Ideally, the chart should have a drawing of the control, some succinct description and the hierarchy if possible.
Has anyone seen such a thing? Freeware or Payware, can even be from a book I could buy.
The following MSDN link lists the controls within the Silverlight SDK:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc189048(VS.95).aspx
You can try the sdk controls live following this link:
http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/Silverlight/SampleBrowser/#/?sref=HomePage
The controls within the Silverlight Toolkit can be found here:
http://silverlight.codeplex.com/
Also, there are plenty of third party controls for Silverlight. The following link contains a list to some of them (free or not):
http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/01/28/comprehensive-list-of-silverlight-controls.aspx
The controls that are shipped with the platform are fairly straightforward, so I'm not sure that would even make sense - i.e. the basic buttons, input box, text block, etc.
As for the controls that are shipped with the Toolkit, which is the richer feature set released out of band in relation to the Silverlight trunk, you can preview everything you asked for here:
http://www.silverlight.net/content/samples/sl4/toolkitcontrolsamples/run/default.html
What's more, the source code for the preview is included with the tool kit so it's very easy to see how any of those controls were used.

Wpf template gallery

Does anybody know of a gallery of controltemplates, that I could use to learn more about what is possible with the different control types?
look at : https://github.com/jogibear9988/wpftoolkit
I've forked the Theming Package from Codeplex and switched to .Net 4.0
I'm not familiar with a gallery of control templates, though there are lots of examples on the internet. If you have a specific control you'd like to template (e.g. a ListBox or a Button), I would search for specific control templates that relate to that control. You will find countless options.
If you want to learn about what is possible with control templates, I'd suggest picking up one of the many great WPF books. A few I'd recommend are:
WPF Unleashed (by Adam Nathan)
Applications = Code + Markup by (Charles Petzold)
WPF Control Development Unleashed (by Pavan Podila and Kevin Hoffman)
You can completely recreate the visual tree of an element with a control template, so the possibilities are limitless. You can also check out the MSDN Help Topics on control styles and templates:
Control Styles and Templates
Using Templates to Customize WPF Controls
Hope that helps.
There's this one
http://www.xamltemplates.net/
There's this one
http://www.reuxables.com/
There's this one
http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Silverlight%20Toolkit%20Overview%20Part%203&referringTitle=Home
As a word of warning, all templates are not created equal - and not all templates will work across all XAML frameworks. For example if it is written for SL it may not work for WinRT. The same for WPF. But this list will get you started. In the end, you will probably create your own.

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