Designer WPF

Several months back, I was doing some work for a company that was using WPF for a stylus based application. One of the things that they found they needed was a scrollbar that could be used by left handed people who would have to cover the entire screen with their left hand in order to scroll a traditional scroll viewer.

The solution ended up being so easy in WPF that I thought I’d post it here.

I’m in a two-birds-one-stone mood, so we’ll do this for both the listview, which will also cover a more traditional scrollviewer. Let’s start with our ever friendly listview.

At the very sight of this thing, with a stylus in hand, your average lefty is thinking to him or herself “I wonder if I can do my work upside down?” Let’s show them that we love and accept them just as they are.

The first thing we’re going to do is create a new template for this sucker, so right click on your listview and go to “Edit Control Parts (Template) -> Edit a Copy…”

Now we’re looking at the standard listview template. Mine looks like this:

Let’s dig right into the ScrollViewer. If you’re doing this from the listview (like I am) then creating a template for the listview has already created a template for the scrollviewer. If you’re starting from a basic scrollviewer, you can pretty much start right here.

For the purposes of making this thing easy to work with in Blend, go ahead and set the HorizontalScrollBarVisibility and VerticalScrollBarVisibility to Visible.

And then “Edit Control Parts (Template) -> Edit a Copy…” (or “Edit Control Parts (Template) -> Edit Template” if it is available).

We are now looking at the guts of the ScrollViewer Control.

ListView ScrollViewer will look like this:

The normal ScrollViewer will look like this:

For our purposes, they’re functionally the same. It is actually a fairly simple control… basically just a Grid panel with the columns and rows set up like so:

<Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
      <ColumnDefinition Width=”*“/>
      <ColumnDefinition Width=”Auto“/>
</Grid.ColumnDefinitions>

<Grid.RowDefinitions>
      <RowDefinition Height=”*“/>
      <RowDefinition Height=”Auto“/>
</Grid.RowDefinitions>

The scrollBars are set up so that their visibility is tied to (duh) the visibility that is set on the control. But what this does is it means that when they are collapsed… they Grid reclaims the space that they were taking up.

Now… here’s the hilarious part… in order to make this ScrollViewer left handed, all you have to do is swap the Grid.Columns:

<Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
      <ColumnDefinition Width=”Auto“/>
      <ColumnDefinition Width=”*“/>
</Grid.ColumnDefinitions>

You’ve now switched the columns so that the left handed column is auto. Here’s a list of the Grid.Column realignments you’ll need to make:

Change Column to “1″:

• PART_HorizontalScrollBar
• All DockPanels (ListView only)
• PART_ScrollContentPresenter (ScrollViewer only)
• Corner (ScrollViewer only)

Change Column to “0″:

• PART_VerticalScrollBar

Basically, swap everything from in the two columns.

Done.

If you want to make this a more robust control, I recommend creating a ScrollViewer with an additional dependency property (IsSouthPaw or something). Make it so that your Grid has three columns:

<Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
      <ColumnDefinition Width=”Auto“/>
      <ColumnDefinition Width=”*“/>
      <ColumnDefinition Width=”Auto“/>
</Grid.ColumnDefinitions>

And then you can just create a trigger that swaps the column placement of your PART_VerticalScrollBar. Such a trigger will look something like this. And by “something”, I mean “exactly”.

<Trigger Property=”IsSouthPaw” Value=”True“>
      <Setter Property=”Grid.Column” TargetName=”PART_VerticalScrollBar“  Value=”0” />
</Trigger>

Go forth and make Ned Flanders proud.

By the way, I listen to pop punk whenever I write my tutorials and I just thought I should let Senses Fail know that they can probably get away with about 80% less “dying cat” screaming and still put out good music. You know… because they’re probably WPF programmers on the side and they’ll probably read this to solve all their left-handed scrollbar needs.

 This tutorial derives from the general “How to Style the ComboBox” set of tutorials.

First let’s make sure you’re in the right place. In this tutorial, we’re going to style the comboBox drop down (also known as the ComboBox popup) seen highlighted in red below.

We will not be styling the items inside the dropdown (highlighted in blue). You can learn how to do that here.

So… let’s just go after some of the basics in styling the dropdown. We’ll give it a new background, a new border and we’ll round the edges to make it just a little more bubbly.

To start out, we’ll need to get to our comboBox control template, so right click on the comboBox in the Objects and Timeline window and go to “Edit Control Parts (Template) -> Edit a Copy…”

Name it something you like and we’re on our way. 

We’ll be editing the PART_Popup. Whatever you do, don’t change the name to this sucker. Whenever you see a “PART_Something”, it is a necessary part of that specific control (hence the naming convention).

The ComboBox dropdown (which we’ll be calling a popup for the remainder of this post)  is made up of a low cost drop shadow (see more on that here), a border, a scrollviewer and the itemsPresenter.

Most of the standard styling we might want to do is probably going to happen in the Border titled DropDownBorder. We can alter the background and the border brushes easily enough by just changing them in the Properties window. But you may notice some quirky behavior from our scrollviewer when we change the CornerRadius. Below, I’ve changed the CornerRadius to “0,0,10,10” and we can see that we lose part of the corner under the scrollviewer.

We can solve this easily enough by adding some padding through the Border. Below I’ve added a padding of “0,0,2,6“.

Better, but not really ideal. In a perfect world, we would be able to say that the border us able to cut off its content in that nice pretty rounded manner.  (If anyone knows how to do that… let me know, I haven’t given it hours of thought yet, but I’d love to know). In this case, however, this sub-optimization is the price we’re going to have to pay if we don’t want to have to go in and mess with the scrollbar style and template.

One of the questions I get most often from designers and almost never from developers is:

How can I get drop shadows into my application without killing my performance?

 It is, of course, easy as punch and pie to get drop shadows into your application. You can just use the Bitmaps Effects panel in the Appearance section:

For the love of God, please do not use the Bitmap Effects in the Appearance section!

If any developers found out that I told you to use BitmapEffects, they would hunt me down and cut off my fingers. This is because, while the Bitmap Effects in WPF are all sorts of cool, they make your computer break down into uncontrollable sobbing. Bitmap Effects hog system resources by requiring software rendering for render-heavy effects. There is no better way to slow down a perfectly good application than to give every other element a drop shadow.

But, what if you really really want to?

Continue reading ‘WPF Drop-Shadows on The Cheap’ »

This is actually a continuation of my post on getting the ComboBox items to accept text wrapping, so I’ll be working from that point forward. If you’re coming fresh into this, you won’t be missing anything… but that is my explaination for the pictures containing wrapping text.

When last we left our heroes, we has a couple problems. The first was that our items were either black text on a white background and ran together in a very un-designer-y way.

The second was that the selected item background makes your eyes bleed such a horrid blue color you’ll feel like Paul Atreides staring at a stone burner.

Was that a little too geek? My apologies.

Continue reading ‘How Do I Style The ComboBox Items?’ »

I’ve been spending the past several days fighting with the ComboBox in an attempt to make it so something very simple: Wrap text inside the combo box. I’ve finally figured it out, so I thought I’d share.

OK, first of all, make sure that your ComboBox is hooked up to something, even if that something is some random RSS feed. I have a post that can help you with that over here. Bind your comboBox to the “Items” part of the New York Times RSS feed.

You need to do this because, if you do not, you will have to set the same data template to every single ComboBoxItem that you add to the ComboBox. And that’s just no fun.

Starting out, your ComboBox should look something like this:

 Right click on your ComboBox and select “Edit Other Templates -> Edit Generated Items (ItemTemplate)-> Create Empty…” Give your new data template a name and Blend will take you into the Data Template design.

Continue reading ‘How Do I Wrap Text In The ComboBox?’ »

OK, it’s really late and I want to get this done, so we’re going to go through the easy way, which will require some XAML, but I’ll try to keep it as Blend-y as possible.

So you have a column header and you want the text inside to wrap when the header space gets too short for the content. Your header probably looks something like this:

First, go to wherever your resources are being held and type the following in:

<Style x:Key=”CustomHeaderStyle“ TargetType=”{x:Type GridViewColumnHeader}“>
</Style>

Continue reading ‘How Do I Wrap Text in a ListView Header?’ »

Please Read: Strangely, when you do a Google search for “wpf” and “listview”, this is one of the top links. This is odd because this particular post is kind of an advanced tutorial. If you’re looking for more general information on styling the wpf listview, check out this post. It is probably much closer to what you’re looking for.

This is a bit of an advanced tutorial. I’m putting it up because I just figured out how to do it and I want to share. You can also download the project files for this tutorial (in zip format… requires .Net 3.5).

Recently, I received from my user experience designers a wireframe that looked something like this:

As you can see, there are embedded categories (categories within categories) here. I considered many solutions (hacks), but I found that a deeper understanding of the ListView and how it works would allow me to resolve this issue very simply (and without even touching the code behind). Continue reading ‘Embedded ListView Columns (Columns Within Columns)’ »

I had a question from a reader in an earlier post on how to resize the ListView Gripper (seen below) so I wanted to address that in this quick post.

 Styling the gripper is actually pretty easy. First, take a look at my Styling the ListView Column Header post. Follow that along until you get to the template for the ColumnHeader (by the fifth image down).

You should have something that looks like this:

Now we’re going to ignore everything here except that little part at the bottom the “PART_HeaderGripper”

Continue reading ‘How do I style the ListView column gripper (also known as a “splitter” or a “seperator”)’ »

ListView header Styling is one of the most difficult styling pieces I’ve had to deal with. Part of this is because it is just another part of the seemingly endlessly complex listview. The other part is just because of the way the styling for the listview is put together in WPF.

In this post, we’re going to change the default color of the header (background and foreground) and make the headers look more like bubbles. Why? Because we can! (Everytime I say that, somewhere a usability expert loses a little bit of their soul.)

Take note that anything done in this will affect the whole header. If you’re looking to do something to one individual column in the header, you need to go to this post on ColumnHeaders (coming soon). See the bottom of this post for more details.

As a point of note, the easy way in this particular case involves going directly into the XAML and the hard way involves going through the steps in Blend. The easy way is posted at the bottom.

Now for the hard way. First, go to your listview, right click on it and go to:

Edit Control Parts (Template) -> Edit a Copy…

Continue reading ‘Styling the ListView Column Header’ »

So… you’ve got your listview and you want your items to look a certain way. In this post, we’ll look at changing as many things as we can inside the ListView ItemContainerStyle.

 First things first… getting to the ItemContainerStyle using Blend. With the ListView selected, go to the top menu and click:

 Edit Other Styles -> Edit ItemContainerStyle -> Create Empty…

Name your Style and you get tossed into Style editing. Here, you can do all sorts of great things, like… um… changing the background or something.

Continue reading ‘Styling ListView Items Using Blend’ »