Silverlight 4 NewBie Question - silverlight

I am watching a video from Silverlight.net website about DataForm. There is no source code download, so I am typing in the code as I watch the video. Unfortunately I can't replicate what is shown in the video. there are several issues. I am going to list out only the first 2
1) The presenter shows a simple class inside DataForm that has a icon at the very top of the data form that upon clicking it makes the DataForm editable and a save button appears at the
bottom. I did'nt get the same thing when I ran my code against Silverlight 4 or Silverlight 3
2) Than he goes on to show that if you mark your class [Bindable(false)] you shouldn't see anything in your page. I did that but my form still shows all the properties
I stopped after these 2 issues. If the features being talked about in this video were deprecated in the final release than this video should have been taken off the site.
can anyone help me with this??

There are differences in Silverlight 4 from previous version with the DataForm. If you are using SL4 then perhaps I can help:
Add CommandButtonsVisibility="All" to your DataForm XAML. Explore CommandButtonsVisibility for other options.
I have this same problem. Perhaps someone can shed light on this?

Related

Windows 8 like modal dialog using WPF

I am working on a WPF-MVVM (.Net 4.0) application that has a Metro look (it just has a look, it is not a metro application.)
I need to show a windows 8 like message box that blocks the operations for the user before he rids that message box by clicking yes/no/cancel (or any button.).
I came across this otherwise great article and momentarily thought that I have found the solution. But this has its own drawback.It just stops the user from interacting with the controls behind by mouse clicks. The user can however use the tab key to get back to the buttons behind and click them (pressing enter).
A number of things are coming to my mind:
should I go for custom adorners and play with hitTestable property?
Or should I place a control and play with its visible property.
Before going for any approach I thought of putting forward my question to the wonderful community here if someone has done a similar thing in past and provide me some pointer/reference/approach.
Can someone suggest what is the way to achieve this? Please note I will be happy to use prism or any other open source if that solves the purpose but the window will have to be custom made.
Please excuse me if you find this too stupid a question. Please pardon my ignorance. Thanks for reading this.
I recently came across a similar problem, I resolved it using a DialogPresenter as explained there:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/36516/WPF-Modal-Dialog
I had to do a few tweaks there and there but overall it's working fine and I now have a nice way to display dialog boxes!
There is a better way of doing it
var dialog = new MessageDialog("Select Social network is already authorised!");
dialog.ShowAsync();

DevExpress PivotGrid (Silverlight) : Popup Menus don't popup

We are using DevExpress Silverlight PivotGrid (11.2.7). The problem is that none of the popups work as one would expect.
Here is the xaml code (note that all of these properties are True by default and don't need to be set)
<dxpg:PivotGridControl
x:Name="pivotGrid"
... data bindings ...
IsFieldValuePopupMenuEnabled="True"
IsHeaderMenuEnabled="True"
IsHeaderAreaMenuEnabled="True"
/>
Once the host control for the grid is shown and the data is loaded right-clicking on any of the relevant areas doesn't bring either of the popups (there are 3).
Strangely (or not so strangely) in the sample SL project provided by devex everything works as it should.
The one (significant) difference between the sample app and our project is that we are using MEF and relevant .xaps are loaded dynamically based on which user logged in and some other stuff.
We have tried a lot stuff to figure out what is wrong but haven't managed to find anything even remotely relevant. Here is what we have tried :
Adding the pivotgrid to the host tabpage in codebehind after imports have been satisfied;
Setting / resetting properties mentioned above after imports from codebehind;
Adding the control to the startup page of the project before the MEF madness kicks in;
We also tried to popup the menus manually by inheriting from the pivotgrid control, but that has not yielded much;
Enabled RedrawRegions to make sure the popup is not popping 'under'. It's not;
Any pointers or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Alex
It appears that this was some bug in the version we were using at the time.
After updating to 12.1 everything works like it should without any tinkering from our side.
Looks like devex guys have bugs too...who knew right :)

AutoComplete-ready ComboBox in Silverlight 3

Has anybody out there had a situation where you needed to implement an "editable" ComboBox in Silverlight? My client wants a ComboBox in their UI that allows the user to place focus on the selection box and start typing to automatically pull up the desired value from the available items, rather than requiring use of the drop-down list.
This feature is available, I know, in several implementations from third parties. For example, you can make this happen fairly easily with Telerik's RadControls for Silverlight. However, my client is restricted to using the Silverlight 3 Toolkit, with no third-party tools or plug-ins.
Any suggestions for a quick, down-and-dirty implementation? Any guidance or links are appreciated!
Thanks,
Jeff
Okay, we had the same problem.
We went ahead and used the AutoCompleteBox from the Silverlight 3 tookit. Their implementation has a lot of things missing that we wanted. Because of these limitations, we created our own that inherited from it. It worked great and was very simple to do. Any tutorial for making your own control that inherits from another will help you.
Have fun. Since the toolkit is open source, you can always look at the code for guidance.
You can see the samples from the toolkit here: https://www.silverlight.net/content/samples/sl3/toolkitcontrolsamples/run/default.html

WPF solution design of slideshow application

Been thinking about this for hours now. Im building a simple slideshow application, where the user creates slides through a web application and publishes them to a wpf "player". The user is allowed to create two types of slides one based on html and one based on xaml (thought this would be easy).
When i get the slide to the player i have to determine how to render/load the slide. The HTML slide i convert to xaml (code i found on msdn) as a flowdocument (but now what to do with it?). The Xaml i just get in "raw" xaml.
My plan is to convert both of these to xaml, then have the slide load the xaml in someway and display it, but how? And would this setup be the proper architecture? please bear in mind that this is a small player application.
Any help on either architecture or on how to display these are highly appreciated.
Sincerely,
Brian
Look at the Slide.Show project from Vertigo. It a WPF project released under codeplex. It may give you ideas on the design.
Why not just display them in the web page? There are a huge number of slideshow applications for the web already.

Running a Silverlight Website

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.

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