Designer WPF

So I recently found and installed the WPF Performance Suite, which I’ve found to be nice and easy to use.

Microsoft documentation on using the WPF Performance Suite.

As a designer, I’ve found the Perforator a particularly useful tool in the suite.

Perforator is a performance profiling tool for analyzing rendering behavior. The Perforator main window displays a set of options that allow you to analyze very specific rendering behavior in parts of your application.

Key for me in this suite is the “Frame rate” counter in this application. As you probably know, the human eye is pretty comfortable with 30-60 frames per second (for computer applications). Because WPF allows the simple creation of animations to aid usability and design, smooth frame rates have become important to me.

 If they’re important to you, I highly reccomend the above suite.

Get it. Use it. Love it.

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’ »

I just signed up for MIX 08, Microsoft’s annual Vegas conference for web developers an designers. They’ve extended the early bird deadline to January 31st, so head over there and sign up now!

As a general rule, I’m more inclined toward the hard client at the moment, but that has been in a large part because:

• I’m getting paid to do WPF stuff.
• I’m not a coding guru which makes alot of the more intense web development stuff somewhat outside my reach.
• Its easier to do fun and cool stuff with WPF than with Silverlight. Or Flash. Or Javascript.
• I’m getting paid to do WPF stuff.

Even so, it should be a fun time. Especially if the MIX promotional material (seen below) is to be believed.

I am under the impression that the women in the rightmost image are the kind of cutting edge web developers I will be schmoozing with at MIX08.

Please, leave me to my ignorance.