Josh Smith just published a great article about his solution to using RoutedCommands in WPF. The problem he solves, has been solved by others before, however, I think this is a very lightweight succinct way of doing it. Basically, when you set a command to a button, you will have to handle that logic (canExecute and Execute) in the codebehind of the view. Since you are (hopefully) using a MVC, MVP or MVVM approach, you would rather not go through the codebehind of the view, but directly route the

I'm building a small sample for EFContrib , and thought it would be cool to use the new MVC framework 'Prism' for it. Prism is a new framework currently under development by the patterns and practices group. It is not feature complete and everything might change in the next drop. But, well, it's fun to see such a framework develop and how best to understand it, than by building something simple with it! I'm trying to do something fairly basic: I have a view that has a button on it. If the button

After writing so much about my own MVC implementation for WPF, I'm happy to see the birth of Prism. This is what the site has to say about it: "Prism" addresses the challenges around building complex enterprise WPF applications. As the complexity increases and the teams grow, the application becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. Using "Prism" enables designing a composite application that is composed of many discrete, loosely coupled modules. These modules can be developed,

I sometimes do it, but don't like to do it too often. But this one, I just want to archive here so I can always find it: Beatriz has just released a great ready-to-use drag and drop library. She has also written a terrific blog post about it here , that shows the steps she took to achieve it. I just ran the project and it performs well, has insertion adorners and even allows dragging and dropping within the same list. Good stuff!

Scott Guthry announces the .Net 3.5 client product Roadmap here . Highlights are improved bootstrapping of 3.5 for your client applications and improved cold startup times. But the real news for the WPF addicts: the dropshadow and blur bitmap effects will now be hardware accelerated!! That is a big thing. These effects are completely useless at the moment, but if they are hardware accelerated, you will be able to do some great stuff. He also hints at a new effects API and data virtualization support.

It frequently happens that you wish to enrich a valuetype with more data, most often the properties in your domainmodel. In this post I will present one way you could achieve that. But first, let's look at why you would want such a thing, then look at how you would go about this normally and finally look at another approach. Why metadata about a property Let's say you have a domainobject 'Person' like so:     public   class Person     {        

If you are working with clients that do not see the use of automated testing (be it in unit tests of code blocks, or specific UI testing), you are in for a hard time. Maybe you should walk away, but let's face it: you will probably give in and try to do your best. I have even had heated discussions with developers that do not see the use of it, certainly when there are monkey-testers to do it. Testing the userinterface is incredibly hard to do. When you're testers are brave, they might use a testtool

Dax Pandhi , of Reuxables is offering a lite version of their commercial theme: paper . You only get the compiled dll, but still, it's a bargain ;-) I have not used any commercial themes yet, and as I am not working for a client at this point, I probably won't at this moment ;-) I also do not know yet whether I like the theme. I am going to use it and just see! Are there other commercial theme packs around? I would like a pack that makes my applications look like this application ;-)

I'm a strange man: I seem to be equally interested in EntityFramework and in WPF. They are such different beasts, and still I take great pleasure in using them both! That's possibly because I view them as enablers of the kind of projects I like to do. Weird. Anywho, it's been a long time since I blogged about WPF. And even longer since I blogged about unittesting WPF. The simple trick in this post is probably widely used already in the community: I haven't paid any attention ;-) In this post , I

In my previous project, we used the Composite Application Block with WPF to decouple our application. Lately I have been thinking alot about this, and found some good material on the subject that I wanted to share. But first, let me give a high-level overview of my previous approach. If you are in need to first learn about MVP, check out this dnrTV video where Jean Paul Boodhoo talks about Model View Presenter. First off, keep in mind that CAB was not written for WPF and has to be hacked to actually