We Keep Coding

How do you bind 2 controls?

In my app, there is a feature to customize it's own Controls (like Textbox, Labels, Textblocks, Buttons, etc), this feature interface is located inside a TabItem. Lets say i want to modify Button A, which is located in ANOTHER container. On the feature interface, i set it's Foreground property to White, at this moment i don't know whether the Button looks better or not, so i have to go to the container which contains that Button.
What am i trying to do is, i want to create a "preview" Control (which is the same type as the actual target) inside the feature interface. I want any changes on this "preview" control are reflected to the actual target Control. With this, i won't need to navigate to where the target Control located.
When i used the title ("How do you bind 2 controls)" with google, all results actually gives me "how to bind SINGLE property of a control to another control's property". What i want is how do you bind/link 2 Controls literally, i mean, i want to bind ALL properties of Control A to ALL properties of Control B.
Binding them one by one is one (tiring) way. Is there another way to achieve this?
I would prefer code-behind method.

There is no "fast" way to do this, you will have to bind one by one according to your buisness logic.
Also a binding is not cheap regarding performance so binding each and every property of a control even those you dont explicitly need, is a warning sign.

Telerik Tab Control - Only the currently SelectedPage shows controls visibility correctly

I'm using the 2013 Q3 Telerik Tab control in a C# WinForms project. If I test the .Visible property of a control placed on a Page in the Tab then it will always return false unless I Select the page. Is there another property besides .Visible that can be used to test the Visibility of a control on a Page without having to select it?

Here's my dilatation:
You should not change the native meaning of the control's properties. Period. I asked in a comment what were you trying to achieve, because I suspected that you're basing some UI logic on some control's visibility, which in my opinion isn't too good approach. The visibility should be bound to the background logic, not the oposite. You're hiding controls for some reason, because at some point something happened - so keep track of that "something" instead of inspecting its results. IMO the Visibility property should be set, but never checked.
Alternatively if it's not possible to change the concept for some reason, as a workaround I'd attach a handler to the VisibleChanged event and set Enabled property if the sender is not a tab control - then by checking against Enabled property you'd know whether the control is in use or not. I find it difficult to imagine a situation in which I'd need to check whether a control is visible.

How to reset all items in a groupbox, but not any items outside said groupbox?

I'm working a WPF application which has a number of groupboxes, each containing 3-4 controls a piece. Each of these groupboxes contains a reset button.
Instead of explicitly writing a line for each item the groupbox reset buton should reset is there a way to have the reset button only reset all items for the groupbox it's contained upon?
When researching this issue I found the following post which seems relevant but I'm unsure how to extend Nathan's answer to do this: What is the best way to clear all controls on a form C#?

You can use this question as an source of methods you need.
First of all you need to find groupbox that contains button. To do that use sender argument form click event it is reference to button that was clicked and call FindVisualParent method from one of answers in that question. This will give you groupbox.
Then Find all ui elements by FindVisualChildren<DependencyObject> method. This will give you super set of controls that are to be cleared.
Then it is just a loop over this as in question that you referenced. Note that that question was intended for winforms not wpf so you will have to revise the controldefaults dictionary which handles grouping controls ~(Panel GroupBox) which is not needed here (and would not work in wpf).

You might add a TAG to each control telling which property is beeing edited in the control, and then on reset press, you travel up the button to find containing GroupBox, then down to find all controls contained in this GroupBox, and then you find, with the TAGs, the name of the properties that needs reset. You then reset the properties using Reflexion.
Maybe an issue is that the default value might not be obvious. But you could store the default values for all your bindings in a static object, and copy the value of the property for this reset object into the current status object.
Rq : you could also use reflexion to get the bindings for all control of current GroupBox, and then get the bounded properties from the binding, so no need for a TAG. BUT if a control has several bindings, you won't know which one to reset. In my case, controls within GroupBoxes have also a color binding to indicate wether they have default value (green) or non-default (red), hence the need for a TAG. (BUT the color indicator are read-only so reflexion could, in fact, also be used with a little more use of Reflexion... was just too lazy to change a working logic when i saw that :-) )
I don't know about your bindings so obviously i cannot tell what's best, i hope this thoughs can help.

Controlling event-driven navigation in a WPF application

I think the title for this question is probably wrong, but I'm not sure quite how to phrase it. I have a C# 4.0 (VS2010) WPF application.
This application consists of a single window with a header including the basics (logos, captions, etc) and a set of navigation buttons (back, retry, next, etc). The rest of the window is comprised of a listbox that is populated with one or more usercontrols based on what mode the app is currently in.
The way the code is currently written when the mode changes the listbox is cleared, all new user controls are added, and the buttons are set to their required state. This is fine for the initial state of each window mode but I'm having trouble deciding a good approach to update the navigation buttons as the contents of the controls change.
For example one screen is a configuration screen and there are three user controls contained within the listbox. These controls are custom classes that inherit from UserControl. Additionally they implement an interface that defines a method 'bool Validate' which determines if the control has been completely filled out.
This same scenario could apply to lots of other situations but this is a generic use case that is pretty straightforward to understand. When the screen initially loads the 'Next' button, whose visibility is controled by the parent window, is visible but disabled as the child controls can't possibly yet be valid. At some point as the user fills out arbitrary data within one or more controls each one would return true if its Validate method was called.
At the point where all controls are valid, the next button would then become enabled. Fairly straightforward design.
The problem is each control doesn't know what screen it is on, and this is by design. I don't want the controls having to be aware of each other and updating a button status in the parent window. I also don't want the parent window to run a polling thread to call Validate every second because in some cases the validation could be complex.
I'm thinking that the change event of each control within the UserControl (text boxes, radio buttons, etc) would all call a trigger a private validate event and this would set some public property on the interface or class.
f I can do that is there a way for the parent window to respond in an event-driven manner to the change of that property? I'm not looking to do this in WPF, doing this in C# code is preferable as I don't want to get into the complexity of WPF quite yet. I'm just not sure, other than constant polling, how to tell when every control's 'IsValid' property will have synchronized all to 'true', if that is even a good approach.
EDIT:
Okay, here is another way to ask the question. I have a List of something (in this case a list of an interface) and want to be able to respond to a public property change on each item in the list so I can take an action when all items are (bool in this case) true. The above explains the use case, but this is a more generic version of the question.
EDIT:
#Vincent "you might do it in an even simpler way with a custom "ValidatedChanged()" event that you can hook in the same way."
It turns out that this is really what I was looking for. The property notification approach seems to be more for ease of use with data-bound controls. I read a lot of posts on this site about how to implement that but it really wasn't what I wanted. I just wanted my objects to notify that an event occured, which happened to be a property change, but that is beside the point. I found documentation on implementing an event in an interface and I have it working now. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction and helping me realize what is really is that I needed.

So you have a ListBox which contains all your controls, and when all controls are validated, the Next button should be enabled ?
If so, when one of your control validates, you might search all sons of the ListBox to check them for validation, using VisualTreeHelper.GetChildren to get them all.
If you don't want / can't have a handle on the ListView, you might find it by searching up the visual tree starting from the control that just validated.
Each 'Validated' event of each control would be handled by a 'CheckIfAllValidated' event handler, and when all are validated, you could raise a 'AllValidated' events that would be handled by the button (and maybe some other controls as well) to enable it.
Edit : I understood that you did not want each component to know about their children, but notice that even the quite common PropertyChanged event has a 'sender' fields that tells who did raise the event. So any listener of a PropertyChanged on, say, the 'validated' property, can go up the visual tree, stop when it encounters a ListView, then search downstairs if all control that have a validated property do have this property set to true...
Edit 2 :
To be more clear about how to do it, either in your window new or on the window loaded event
or maybe on the ContentRendered Event, depending on how your controls are loaded, you
might use once that code to hook a handler to all your controls :
For Each ThisControl In MainListView.
Dim ThisControlType = ThisControl.GetType
Dim ThisControlPropertyChangedEvent = ThisControlType.GetEvent("PropertyChanged")
' you might wanna check here if event is not null / nothing
ThisControlPropertyChangedEvent.AddEventHandler(ThisControl, New PropertyChangedEventHandler(AddressOf APropChanged))
Next
and you write the APropChanged somehow like that :
Public Sub APropChanged(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As PropertyChangedEventArgs)
If e.PropertyName = "Validated" Then
Dim ValidatedForAll = True
For Each ThisControl In MainListView.Items
Dim ThisControlType = ThisControl.GetType
Dim ThisControlValidatedProperty = ThisControlType.GetProperty("Validated")
'you might wanna check for non null here
If Not ThisControlValidatedProperty.GetValue(ThisControl, Nothing) Then
ValidatedForAll = False
Exit For
End If
Next
If ValidatedForAll Then
MessageBox.Show("Yeeppee") ' you might send an event instead.
End If
End If
End Sub
Edit 3 : you might do it in an even simpler way with a custom "ValidatedChanged()" event that you can hook in the same way.

WPF - Dynamic tooltip

I have a class ToolTipProvider
which has a method
string GetToolTip(UIElement element)
which will return a specific tooltip for the UIElement specified, based on various factors including properties of the UIElement itself and also looking up into documentation which can be changed dynamically. It will also probably run in a thread so when the form first fires up the tooltips will be something like the visual studio 'Document cache is still being constructed', then populated in the background.
I want to allow this to be used in any wpf form with the minimum effort for the developer. Essentially I want to insert an ObjectDataProvider resource into the Window.Resources to wrap my ToolTipProvider object, then I think I need to create a tooltip (called e.g. MyToolTipProvider) in the resources which references that ObjectDataProvider, then on any element which requires this tooltip functionality it would just be a case of ToolTip="{StaticResource MyToolTipProvider}"
however I can't work out a) how to bind the actual elemnt itself to the MethodParameters of the objectdataprovider, or b) how to force it to call the method each time the tooltip is opened.
Any ideas/pointers on the general pattern I need? Not looking for complete solution, just any ideas from those more experienced

Create a new user control which functions as a tool-tip view factory.
Use your control as the tool-tip, passing any data you need for the factory to your control using binding (e.g. the data, the containing control, ...)
<AnyControl>
<AnyControl.ToolTip>
<YourToolTipControl Content="{Binding}" />
</AnyControl.ToolTip>
</AnyControl>

Not calling myself an expert, but I'd probably attempt such a feature with an attached property. This would be attachable to any element in your UI and you can specify an event handler that gets access to the object to which the property is being attached as well as the value passed to the attached property. You can keep a reference to the element to which your attached property was attached and you would then be able to change the ToolTip whenever you want.