A StringFormat converter for Windows 8 Metro 20 March 2012 Diederik-Krols Metro, WinRT Some people seem to think that the world has only one language, one currency, and one way to represent a date, a time, or a number. So WinRT comes without a StringFormat option in data binding. I know for sure that I never built a WPF or Silverlight application without extensively using that StringF... [More]
A Radial Gauge custom control for Windows 8 Metro 09 March 2012 Diederik-Krols Metro, WinRT A long time ago in a galaxy actually not so far away, Colin Eberhardt wrote a Radial Gauge custom control for Silverlight in less than six hours. It had everything a gauge should have: a needle, and a scale with tick markers and labels. Hell, it even had colored quality range indicato... [More]
Databinding to the VariableSizedWrapGrid in Windows 8 Metro 07 March 2012 Diederik-Krols Metro, WinRT This article describes how to implement data binding and using variable sized cells in a VariableSizedWrapGrid control in a Windows 8 Metro application, Customer Preview release. The VariableSizedWrapGrid control exposes the ColumnSpan and RowSpan attached properties. These allow to specify the numb... [More]
Using Grouped GridView Navigation in Windows 8 Metro 02 March 2012 Diederik-Krols Metro, WinRT This article describes how you can navigate through large amounts of data in a Metro application, on the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. We'll use a grouped and a non-grouped GridViews, a SemanticZoom, a WrapGrid, and a VariableSizedWrapGrid control. The app was built with the brand new V... [More]
Building C# custom controls in WinRT Metro 22 January 2012 Diederik-Krols This article describes how to build custom WinRT Metro controls in C# and XAML, with the Developer Preview version of Visual Studio 11. WPF, Silverlight, and WinRT Metro have two ways to roll your own controls: custom controls, and user controls. User controls are composite controls that are created... [More]
Hello ObservableVector, goodbye ObservableCollection 03 January 2012 Diederik-Krols Metro, WinRT WARNING: Article content applies to Windows 8 Developer Preview only. ObservableCollection<T> is alive and kicking in the current release. WinRT, the new Windows 8 runtime for Metro applications, introduces a new interface for collection change notification. IObservableVec... [More]
Databinding to an enumeration in WinRT 27 December 2011 Diederik-Krols Metro, WinRT This article demonstrates how to databind a radiobutton to an enumeration element, in a WinRT Metro application. The MVVM viewmodel has a property of an enumeration type, which is bound to the IsChecked property of some radiobuttons. A value converter compares the value from the viewmodel ... [More]
Databinding to an enumeration in WPF 24 December 2011 Diederik-Krols This article demonstrates how to databind a radiobutton to an enumeration element, in a WPF application. The MVVM viewmodel has a property of an enumeration type, which is bound to the IsChecked property of the radiobutton. A value converter compares the value from the viewmodel with an enumeration ... [More]
Building WPF forms without GDI decoration 15 December 2011 Diederik-Krols WPF This article describes a base class for WPF windows. It hides all GDI chrome, without losing functionality. WPF promises entire freedom in look-and-feel of your application. In its standard configuration, however, a WPF Window is still hosted in a classic GDI-based WinForm. Its border and header are... [More]
A BooleanToVisibilityConverter for WinRT 15 November 2011 Diederik-Krols Metro, WinRT This article describes a reversible boolean-to-visibility valueconverter for WinRT and Metro. [More]