Designer WPF

I was working on one of my projects today and I noticed that one of our popups displaying search results in a ListBox was having really serious performance problems.  After determining that the problem was, in fact, on the WPF side of things, I was somewhat baffled. I wasn’t doing anything that I could think of that should be pushing the limit of what WPF could do.

 Finally, I went looking online for an answer and discovered a list of possible performance killers for the ListView (and ListBox) on Mark Shurmer’s blog. Chief among his no-no’s:

Embedding the ListView inside a StackPanel

Which is exactly what I was doing.

Why is this a problem? To answer that question, let’s take a look at the ItemsPanel at runtime using Snoop. When I place my ListBox into a Grid, here is what my ItemsPanel looks like:

Continue reading ‘ListView (and ListBox) Performance Issues’ »

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?’ »

 The ComboBox is not the most complex of the WPF applications, but it can be a little tricky, so lets do a general overview post of it before we go into the specifics of how we’re going to make it work.

First of all, if you’re going to test your comboBox design, you should have it hooked up to an ItemsSource. Don’t have one? I have a tutorial in which I walk through attaching an RSS feed to your control. It was originally written for the ListView, but it will work fine for a ComboBox.

To start out… this is your standard ComboBox:

When working on a comboBox, you have a couple of options for the Items inside the ComboBox. If the options never change and are not data-driven, you can just toss come ComboBoxItems into it. Otherwise, you can connect it to some kind of ItemsSource (see the link above).

All of my examples are done with a data-driven ComboBoxes, but you should get the desired results if you run through the tutorials with ComboBoxItems.

First, a little bit about the structure of the comboBox.

Continue reading ‘The WPF Designers Guide to Styling The ComboBox’ »

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?’ »

(I’m getting to the point in a roundabout way… you can skip directly to the point below if you want.)

When I started working on my WPF-Wii tutorials, my first Wii project was the initial version of the WPF-Wii Visualizer.

However, I quickly got tired of writing the code for handling events and transferring the data from the Wiimote library to my application. So (like any noble geek would do) I wrote even MORE code to solve the problem, not only for myself, but for generations to come.

I’ve spend the last week writing a Wii-To-WPF library that shovels the Wiimote properties into properties that use the INotifyPropertyChanged WPF interface. This will allow anyone to connect to the Wii through the WPF data binding. It’s super cool.

(A point of note, I posted an early version of this library. Ignore it. I’m putting up a much improved version in the next couple days.)

The Point

But I had no idea how moving from a basic data transference and event handling to the INotifyPropertyChanged interface would affect my performance.

Here are some screenshots of Perforator (a WPF performance monitoring application) monitoring my WPF-Wii Visualizer in its code-heavy iteration:

I don’t know what all those numbers mean, but the one I’m interested in is the frame rate. As a designer, smoother motion is good… especially if I’m trying to design a multi-point application. A frame rate of 27 isn’t too bad, but this is the best I got. The frame rate usually hovered around 20, dipping as low as five.

Now… this is what I got when I was binding the data through the XAML (absolutely no code whatsoever):

And this was the worst I got. My frame rate was always in the mid 60s and would spike up to 80. Take note that I’m not changing the interface at all. In fact, I’m running the binding version at a handicap (it’s tracking four infrared points instead of the original two).

Exact same XAML … except that the XAML properties are data bound from within the XAML and not assigned via the C# code.

So, lets take an account of the WPF INotifyPropertyChanged interface:

• Allows DataBinding
• Permits code-light or code-free interface design
• Drastic improvements to performance

Use it!

Enough said.

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.

 OK, I hope no one is using my last post as an example of what you should be doing when interfacing the Wiimote with WPF. Because it was completely hack-tastic.

 Instead, use my new WPF/Wii library. It uses the WPF INotifyPropertyChanged interface to act as an interface so that we can bind the Wiimote data directly to the XAML. More on that in a little bit, but first…

In this post, we’ll walk through creating a basic multi-point capable app that uses the Wiimote as an input device. What is really unique about this post is the fact that we’re going to do this in a way that requires absolutely no code whatsoever on your part.

That’s right. No code. At all. Zero knowledge of C# required.

Continue reading ‘WPF Wii Multi-Point Tutorials, Part 2: Writing a Code-less Wiimote Program’ »

Download WPF Wii Data Visualizer (App only, 355K)
Download WPF Wii Data Visualizer (Visual Studio 2008 Source, 676K)

Warning: The project will not run if your Wii controller isn’t connected to your computer.

Using the WPF Wii Data Visualizer (Video)

OK, now that we’ve gotten our Wii Controllers all hooked up to our computers, it’s time to take a look at the data we’re getting from it.

Over the weekend, I pieced together a little application that will help us visualize the incoming Wiimote data in a way that would help understand the raw data points a little better as well as help out as we head toward our ultimate goal of multi-point WPF application development. This is what I came up with.

Disclaimer: The source code at this point is a mess. While the interface is all done in XAML and is very WPF, the code-behind is a hacked together mish-mash. I will at some point go back and restructure the code-behind to take advantage of the INotifyPropertyChanged interface. When I do that, I’ll post on it and we’ll see another example of why WPF is so freaking cool.