I've been working on a WPF control for a few weeks now that contains a XAML-drawn map and has the ability to zoom in / out and pan the map. Also, it contains a converter that converts screen coordinates to lat / long coordinates which works pretty nice, however, the converter works based on few constant parameters that should be available when the application gets loaded.
Right now, those parameters are loaded with the non-XAML map file (.dwg file) which requires me to have a reference to an external library and the loading of the file takes up a few seconds when the application is loading for the first time, which is kinda annoying.
I wanted to store that information as constants in my C# code-behind for the XAML control, however is there a way to embed those constants in the XAML itself? Since the control should be as generic as possible and should support all maps that I will give it in the future (each having different parameters) I want the code to read the parameters from the XAML file and use it in the code.
If I wasn't clear in my question please let me know.
You may want to look at this article. It is about Silverlight but it should be applicable. This Code Project article may be of some use also.
Related
I am just starting out with Windows 8/RT app development using C#/XAML and am trying to learn about string resources. I've got a string that I would like to use both as button content and as textblock text. In the examples that I've seen, it looks like I would need to define two different strings in my resource file named something like "myButtonString.Content" and "myTextBlockString.Text". Ideally, I'd like to define my string once in the resource file and use it wherever I please. Is there way that I can define a single resource with a name such as "myString" and assign it to both my button content and my textblock text via xaml? If so, how can I do this?
As a point of reference, this is the resource that I got my initial info from.
I recommend you to use Portable Class Library.
Localization can be shared between the Windows Phone <-> Windows Store projects
It's visible at runtime in xaml editor
You'll use it in the same manner at the both platforms.
It's generally easy, just follow these instructions.
One thing to remember - you should create one line resource file in the WS project for the each language. Otherwise VS will not include them from PCL.
Here is a link to globalizing labels. The same can be used with any UI component. Instead of using whatever.Text="My Button" use whatever.Text=resources.labels.lblMyButton. Your resource files are based on a default resource, for example labels.resx. When the threads culture changes then the appropriate labels_ISO_CULTURE.resx will override whatever is defined in the default.resx.
Take a look at this example.
I am making an application that will generate and SQL scripts from a template and after taking input for different fields from the user.
There are many templates, so the GUI needs to adjust for the fields that the user will be filling out.
In the interest of keeping this scalable, I'd rather not hardcode the GUIs into the program, but would like have it read from an XML file and change based on the template the user has selected.
This is preferred because if a new template were to arise, then all that the program needs is a XML file that corresponds to the template. And the actual code does not need to be changed.
I have my eyes set on using C# for this, as I have good experiences using it.
I am open to suggestions for other languages though.
Edit: This is a project for work, and I wanted to be sure that this is possible with C# before convincing my employers to expand into using C#.
You could do this sort of thing by subclassing Windows.Forms.Form and adding a constructor to accept your XML file as a parameter. Add a parser for your XML file that will interpret instructions for which labels and fields you want to add to a consistent form design (say, two columns with a label for field name on the left and the actual input field on the right, easily achievable by filling the form with a TableLayoutPanel). You just need to lay out your design constraints from the beginning and stick to them.
This is essentially what visual studio does when you create a form through the designer anyway, so I'd suggest you start by creating an example form manually and just looking at the kind of code it places in the form's designer.cs file
Any language can do that. It's more about design patterns than specific technologies.
If you meant writing a GUI only declaratively and with XML, though, then no. You'd have to write your own parsing and GUI assembling code.
I'm working on a number-crunching app with some fairly (from my POV) complex math. My first thought was,
Gee, it'd be really nice to be able to take a screen shot in
Mathematica and include it as a comment in my C# source.
I see a cdata value when entering /// alongside summary, remarks, and other options. Custom tags appear to also be supported (as there doesn't appear to be any validation happening).
In order of preference, I'd like to:
Link Mathematica code to my C# source, and have said code appear, in all its Greek-laden glory, as a comment above the method that calls it (or from which it was generated). Bonus points for actually embedding the Mathematica editor in VS!
Link to an image file containing a screenshot of the above, manually generated via Paint and the snip tool, and have VS display it.
Embed the image in a CDATA section, and have it automagically render inside of VS when viewing the code, inline with said code. Generating a base-85 (or whatever) encoded version of an image is trivial. The problem at this point is getting it to display.
Ways that this is possible:
Write an app that overlays an image on the screen and, via magic, keeps it aligned with the source view in VS. (This is ridiculous, but, hey, so is a language that requires you to denote variable names with a $, and yet has a full BNF grammar available to anyone who can Google. Oh, what a world...)
I got nothing.
Suggestions? Is it possible to extend VS so that an image, or control (where Mathematica could be hosted), can appear in the source view?
(note: one of my favorite statements is "It's software. Anything is possible. Give me a 9-volt battery, a paper clip, pocket knife and a monkey hopped up on speed, and we'll make it happen." In this case, I mean within the realm of practicality.)
It looks like this Visual Studio plug-in should solve most of your requirements:
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/793d16d0-235a-439a-91df-4ce7c721df12
I want to write the entire contents of my application page (eg Mainpage.xml) to a file (in Isolated Storage ) How do I do it in WP7 ? are there any methods available to parse the page contents and write it to file in windows phone 7 ?
There is no built in way to do this.
However there are a couple of approaches you could try:
If the structure is static you could try and extract the resource containing this from the DLL. For future re-use it would be easier to load the page from the DLL again though.
If you're generating a page (or part of a page) at runtime (based on user input/preferences) and you want to be able to save/reload this then just save enough information to be able to recreate it. It's unlikely that XAML would be the best format for this though.
You could create this as you build the UI. Alternatively you could walk the visual tree to get details of all that is rendered. I'd recommend recording as you go so you can more easily keep track of non-default values in the rendered objects.
Quick 1 sentence summary: I wrote a demo app [download src here][1] that doesn't properly display sample data in the Visual Studio Designer and I need help.
After 6+ years developing in C# and WinForms, I've decided to use WPF in my current project. I've written a small demo application to teach myself and experiment with WPF (you can see a screenshot [here][1]). The app simply downloads and displays recent news stories from the Google News RSS feed.
My first attempt at this resulted in the class called "GoogleNewsWidget." After reading about the MVVM model, however, I tried again and built "GoogleNewsWidget2" that attempts to utilize a more MVVM-oriented architecture. I'm not sure which implementation is best as they both seem to be working fine on the whole (and though I'd appreciate comments on which is better, it is not my primary question).
My main problem is that neither play very well with the Visual Studio Designer. The GoogleNewsWidget2 loads and displays data fine when its xaml is opened directly but does not display correctly when embedded into another xaml file . The GoogleNewsWidget does not display data in the Designer in either case.
Any help would be appreciated. Again, the source is available for download [here][1].
Thanks,
Jon
[1]: http://abstract.cs.washington.edu/~jfroehli/reflect/ Demo App Source Code
PS My original post had multiple hyperlinks to screenshots but its posting was denied by StackOverflow for spam prevention reasons. Thus, I created the [1] url, which contains screenshots and a link to source code. If someone could also help me figure out how to use the "Markdown" language for linking, I'd be grateful. :)
Assuming that the VS2010 designer works the way Blend 3 does, you have to provide "dummy" data -- the designer won't pull data from external sources.
Create an object that implements the same interface as your datasource (view model) and fill it with static data. Make sure it has a public, no-arg constructor.
Define it as a resource in your control, giving it a key like "DesignData".
In the root element of your control, add the attribute d:DataContext={DynamicResource DesignData}"
This will be used as the DataContext only when in the designer.