I am building an application which has multiple user entry screens. I would like to know if there are advantages/disadvantages of using wpf popups rather than modal windows?
I am using mvvm-light.
I have noticed that popups are being used extensively in touch applications (eg iPad).
The issue is really one of Desktop vs. Web applications. Popups in Silverlight (or other touch apps) involve having only one real window to work with (the mobile surface, or the web browser). If you are writing a desktop app, then modal windows will probably match user expectations better as Popups cannot leave the parent window.
pop ups are nice but are very difficult to control. In our apps we are using adorners to be 'pop-up' editors - we have created a control that can hold any other control and display it in the adorner layer of the main window. This allows to do things such as having 1 control appear next to another yet still have the other control in use or we can grey out the background and force focus to the new control and not allow any other control to be used until the 'ok' button is pressed. If you Google for adorners in wpf you will find a lot of excellent articles.
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I created WPF application which allows user to interact with itself using touch. Unfortunately touch is working very bad when several instances of the same application are open.
I will try to describe the behaviour that I am facing:
Open two windows and place them right next to each other.
Touch left window with your finger and do not release it.
Any attempts to interact with the second window using touch will fail.
I have some experience of developing touch applications using WinFroms. And I never had such problems before. So I performed the described above trick with two WinForms applications and they are working just like they should - first window (with finger not released) keeps the focus but second window still allows user to perform clicks on its surface.
I also tried mixed combination - when WPF window is focused, WinFroms window still is touchable. But not the other way around - when WinForms window is focused, WPF window won't respond.
Is there anything that can be done to change described behaviour of the WPF windows?
So I have this old PowerBuilder MDI application (medium enterprise app with about 40 windows), and I'm embarking on designing my very first WPF MVVM C# application to replace the aging PowerBuilder app. I've got plenty of C# & .NET experience, but this is my first WPF & MVVM app.
After reading many forum postings after searching for WPF & MDI alternative, I've come to the conclusion that the MDI isn't supported, and that the most commonly proposed substitute is to use the TabControl and dynamically generate the content of each tab page upon demand using a WPF User Control. I had initially been sold on this, and was actually excited by my initial prototype interface with a tabbed Ribbon bar at the top of the app, and the TabControl with the tabs of the app underneath that. However, I have hit a BIG brick wall.
Take a look at the following screen shot of one of the central multi-tab windows from my old application: http://www.creativedatatech.com/downloads/screenshot.jpg
As you can see, the app has a toolbar across the top and the left side, and the example MDI child window (Case Edit Window) that is open has a LOT of tab pages (18 of them), and the users really like being able to quickly click on a tab page to get directly to that information to work on it. Moreover, the users have grown accustomed to being able to open multiple Cases at once and either put them side by side (large monitors), or flip back and forth, possibly copying & pasting between them.
The problem here is that I cannot envision how I am going to incorporate all this multi-tab user experience for the Case Edit Window into a single tab of the top level WPF TabControl. Will the users end up seeing a row of tabs for the WPF TabControl, with one tab for each Case Edit Window that is open, and then inside each "Case Edit" tab page, a further nested set of 18 tab pages?? This seems confusing and a big mess of nested tabs. Add to that the tabs of the Ribbon control at the top of the app, and I think my users will be running after me to lynch me!
After investing two straight weeks reading up on WPF and MVVM, I am left with the sinking feeling that WPF really isn't going to fly well for enterprise apps such as mine.
Surely this can't be true! Does anyone have any comments on how I should go about shaping this app to accomplish what I'm trying to do here? I've already looked at WPF "pages", but I can't have the users serially navigate through all the individual pages to get to the content that they need to work on, and they need to be able to quickly (and visually) navigate to the Case Edit Window content that they need.
I think your problem is not so much WPF, but rather that GUI paradigms have moved away from the MDI that your current app uses. There is nothing stopping you implementing MDI in WPF, but what would be the point if your app ends up looking like it does now?
You really need to think about how to layout your app in a modern way. Perhaps you could keep your tabs for the different cases, but replace the multiple tabs in each child window with a master/detail view, much like Dev Studio does for its Options dialog?
We had this same dilemma, we decided on screen tabs at the bottom with tabs that relate to that screen at the top - and contextual ribbon items.
The tabs in the screens actually just scroll the window to the desired point so all information is sectioned off and available on each screen by scrolling or clicking the tab at the top.
Looks like this
I'm relatively new to the WPF world and I'm working on an application where I need to have multiple windows in one application. Like Photoshop when the user clicks on "New" button a new window opens and the old existing window(s) goes in the background. The toolbar and the statusbar, however, stay on top, untouched.
I would also like to add the feature that the user can work with multiple windows if each of them is not maximized.
How do I achieve this?
I apologize if I'm a bit unclear in framing my question.
What you are (probably) talking about is an MDI Application. "Unfortunately" WPF does not support that natively. I use quotes because it is more frowned upon in modern UI development than it was in the past.
Instead, the most common "WPF way" of doing this is to open each New window in a new tab in a tab control (like Visual Studio and most web browsers do).
If you really want to do an MDI application, Google search that, but to warn you, it probably means creating your own Window manager.
An alternative is to open non-modal windows, with their ShowInTaskbar property set to false. This gives you the ability to open as many windows as you want, but you lose the ability to contain them within a centralized workspace app.
I'm simply wondering if it is possible to open one or more non-modal popups or dialogs, which are NOT limited to be displayed and moved within the bounds of the parent Silverlight control. Doesn't seem to be possible, even for out-of-browser installs. I hope I'm wrong :)
While the previous answers are true, strictly speaking it is possible in browser mode to have a real popup. At the moment it can only be done indirectly and with a lot more work than a normal Silverlight popup Window.
Basically you popup a new Silverlight app (or second instance of the current app) in a browser popup window (not a Silverlight popup). Silverlight can create the popup window via calls to Javascript.
The 2 Silverlight instances usually need to communicate data, but there are several solutions to that problem too. Javascript can also talk to Silverlight objects (love that feature) and pass information back or you could simply pass data one-way via URL parameters.
No this is not possible, Silverlight strictly renders to a single window (or if in Windowless mode the specific rectangle provided to it by its host).
As Anthony said this is not possible. I've heard from some of the people involved with Silverlight development that this is an often-requested feature and will most likely be added in an upcoming version. But I'm guessing it would only be available in "out of browser" mode.
So I'm porting an application from WPF to Silverlight and I have realized that there is no standard Menu control.
So I look around and find some third-party controls that emulate the menu control, like this one at codeplex:
alt text http://www.deviantsart.com/upload/1adt6b3.png
But then I decided to take advantage of this situation and think of some new metaphors besides the standard menu we have been using since Windows 3.0, e.g. I like the following enabled/disabled buttons for a small number of choices, which also work well as a vertical stack, and will try to integrate a drop-down button idea to allow it to hold the number of nested choices that a standard menu control could hold:
alt text http://www.deviantsart.com/upload/1bbtg9l.png
What is the best application navigation menu metaphor you have seen or used in a Silverlight line-of-business application?
How about the Office Ribbon?
http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/01/20/ribbon-control-for-silverlight.aspx
http://www.divelements.co.uk/net/controls/sandribbonsl/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa973809.aspx
Personally, I like the style of Apple's CoverFlow.
You can load various screens in each of the CoverFlow "panels", show the Active panel in the center, and tightly pack the other panels to the left and right.
You gain the ability to allow the user to see their other panels while working on the active one...and you can add a little flair when the user switches between the panels.