Using the AutoCompleteBox in the WPF Toolkit
In this blog post I will look into the AutoCompleteBox in the WPF Toolkit, added in the february release of the WPF Toolkit. The AutoCompleteBox works, just the way I had expected it, but it actually adds a couple of more features than what I would have expected. Only one dll is needed to use the AutoCompleteBox:
System.Windows.Controls.Input.Toolkit
I will not describe all the features in details, only describe the basics of what you need to know to use it! To add a basic AutoCompleteBox, I just add the following line to my XAML:
<Controls:AutoCompleteBox Name="autocompleteBox" />
Unit testing Caliburn applications in NUnit
This is part three in my series on Caliburn, if you haven't please read Part 1: Getting started with Caliburn and Part 2: Multiple Views on one ViewModel.
In this post I will look into the unit testing features of Caliburn and try to give a quick introduction to the essentials of what you need to know to write a couple of small unit tests in NUnit. The documentations on caliburn.codeplex.com on unit testing is fairly good, so I will only try to fill in some missing pieces and give a quick start guide to unit testing Caliburn. If or when you bump into problems with the simple setup described here, it's time to move over to more detailed documentation available in both the documentation and discussion forum on Codeplex.
Splash screen in WPF
Remember the time when adding a splash screen to application was a hassel? In WPF this is now extremely simply, follow these few steps, and you splash screen is available in your WPF application!
Running NUnit in an STA thread
While unit testing a WPF Caliburn application, I bumped into the following error:
The calling thread must be STA
and I ended up with a cross-thread exception. When diving into this problem I found that TestDriver.Net actually runs in STA (acronym for Singel Thread Apartment) by default, but NUnit is not! It is however a fairly simple configuration change to get NUnit running in STA. Add or update your app.config in your test project with following:
Why use Custom Control instead of User Control in WPF?
When I first started experimenting with WPF I was quite confused with the new custom control introduced in WPF. I did a quick Google search but never got the full understanding of the difference, but I read somewhere that in most cases a custom control was not necessary, so I just focused on the regular user control back then.
What’s new in WPF 4.0
Microsoft has just release a series of short (15 minutes long) how-to videos for WPF 4.0 introducing the various new features of WPF 4.0.
Getting started with Caliburn Part 2: Multiple Views on one ViewModel
The documentation and tutorials on Caliburn is still very limited, and is one of the biggest obstacles getting started with Caliburn right now. In this post I hope to fill some of the gaps I have seen in the lack of documentation by showing how you can easily hook up two Views to one ViewModel.
Getting started with Caliburn
The lack of documentation and examples of usage is one of the biggest obstacles getting started with Caliburn. I hope this article can help somewhat!
One of my biggest fears when starting a new project is heading in the wrong direction and not realizing that we are headed for disaster until it's too late. Due to architectural decisions, this is always a worry, but the new project is based on WPF, the risk and possibility of a failure is drastically increased. I'm afraid that my WPF projects become "Windows Formish", not taking advantage of MVP/ MVVM.
This is Part 1 of my series on Caliburn, Part 2 on multiple views on one ViewModel can be found here, and Part 3 on unit testing Caliburn can be found here.
Caliburn was designed to aid in the development of WPF and Silverlight applications, enabling easier use of among other MVP and MVVM. This article will be a walkthrough of a rather simple WPF application based on Caliburn. The example used here is a very simple application retrieving a value from a textbox, publishing it to an EventAggregator, and then let another component handle the published message. Hopefully I am able to show some of the advantages of Caliburn through this example.
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