Those of you that know me are well aware of my enthusiasm for Prism, and today is no different.  About 5 minutes ago a new build of the Prism binaries targeting the .NET 4.5 framework was released.  So those of you who are having to use a custom build, like myself, for your .NET 4.5 projects can now use the “official” libraries from the Microsoft Patterns and Practices team.  So what are you waiting for?

Get The Bits

I would…

If you missed the Windows 8 Unleashed event last Friday in Boise, then you missed an awesome event. We had great speakers, a great facility, great food, and great attendees. It was great!

The event was sold out with 80 attendees registered to attend this great event. On the day of the event, of those 80 registered, only 40 actually showed up. We were expecting a 50% drop rate, and that is exactly what we got.  At least…

This past week I was on the road again.  This time I was visiting Chicago, the “Windy City”.  Let me tell you… it was really windy!  What was I doing there you ask?  Well I was visiting my friends at the Chicago .NET User Group.  What did I talk about?  Well, Prism of course.

The Chicago .NET User Group is lead by Keith Franklin, and they meet every 3rd Thursday of each month at the Microsoft office in Downers…

Lately, we have been ramping up for the release of our newest volume of 12.2 for NetAdvantage for WPF and Silverlight.  Let me tell you, this is a going to be a great release.  I am so excited, I can’t wait until we actually release it to show you what we have in volume 12.2.  This post will cover the new XAML line of business controls and features that we are releasing in NetAdvantage for WPF and Silverlight volume…

Writing a generic custom Prism RegionAdapter for a complex control is sometimes difficult, because custom RegionAdapters are custom.  They normally have some specific logic built into them that make them fit into a particular application just right.  You might need a tweak here or a tweak there, need a feature here or a feature there, all depending on the requirements of the application itself. 

I have been asked numerous…

If you are a user of Infragistics NetAdvantage for WPF and have used the xamRibbon control, then chances are you have probably had the need to create a gallery of some type.  In this post I will show you how to create a gallery of colors, but instead of doing it in code behind, we will populate our gallery items from within a ViewModel.  Yes, that’s right!  We will MVVM-ify our gallery items.

First thing we need to…

Last week I traveled to Nebraska to give my “Introduction to Prism” presentation to the Lincoln .NET User Group and the Omaha .NET User Group. My first stop was on Aug 29 at the Lincoln .NET User Group in Lincoln.  After my talk in Lincoln, I drove up to Omaha for the Omaha .NET User Group meeting on Aug 30 at Farm Credit Services of America.

The Omaha .NET User Group is lead by Matt Ruwe.  Everyone at Farm…

Last week I traveled to Nebraska to give my “Introduction to Prism” presentation to the Lincoln .NET User Group and the Omaha .NET User Group.  My first stop was on Aug 29 at the Lincoln .NET User Group in Lincoln at the Assurity Life Insurance Headquarters.  That’s me in front of the building.

The Lincoln .NET User Group is lead by my friend and community partner in crime Adam Barney.  The facilities…

Most of us geeks have day jobs.  Mine is working as a product manager for Infragistics NetAdvantage for WPF and NetAdvantage for Silverlight.  Some of us also have things we like to do on the side.  In my case, I have many things I like to do.  One of them is being part of a great group of people that author courses for Pluralsight.  Just days ago someone got a wild idea and this is the result.

http://www.youtube.com/embed…

Back in July I wrote a blog post that showed how to add a checkbox to the row selector of the XamGrid and data bind to it.  The demo was written in WPF and used a method that exists inside a Utilities class.  Specifically Infragistics.Windows.Utilities.GetDescendantFromName.  I had a comment that asked me where the same Utilities.GetDescendantFromName method existed in Silverlight.  Well, I soon discovered that it didn’t…

I want to thank everyone that attended yesterdays Infragistics webinar on building composite applications in WPF using Prism.  We had a lot to cover in a short amount of time, and I think we did a pretty good job getting through it.  Although, I did have to go a little fast to make sure I covered all the basics.  We also had some audio issues for those trying to call in through the conference phone number.  Never fear, if…

I was reading the Infragistics forums today and noticed a common question regarding the XamGrid control.  Basically, there is a need to place checkboxes in the row selector of the XamGrid, and then data bind those checkboxes to a property of the bound row object.  The expected behavior is when a checkbox is selected in the row selector column, the data bound property of the object representing the row will be set to true…

I was playing with the Infragistics XamMenu control today and made a discovery that I did not like.  It does not provide support for commanding!  That’s right; no Command or CommandParameter property that I can use to data bind a command in my ViewModel to.  I couldn’t believe it.  Don’t you worry though.  I will be fixing that immediately.  When I say immediately, I mean as soon as I can.  I have placed an…

A couple of days ago, I announced the release of our new XamGantt and XamSyntaxEditor CTP controls.  By now you have probably seen the “Getting Started with the XamSyntaxEditor” post.  Well now it’s time to get to know the XamGantt control.  If you have ever seen Microsoft Project, you already know what a Gantt control is.  If you haven’t, well it’s basically a type of bar chart that illustrates a project…

Yesterday I announced the release of our new XamGantt and XamSyntaxEditor CTP controls.  In this post we are going to get to know the XamSyntaxEditor.  The XamSyntaxEditor is a highly customizable text editing control that provides syntax highlighting and editing behaviors much like the Visual Studio code editor.  The XamSyntaxEditor is provided in both WPF and Silverlight versions with an API that is common across both…

Last week at Microsoft TechEd, two new controls were added to our NetAdvantage for WPF and NetAdvantage for Silverlight products in the form of a CTP release.  So, chances are, if you weren’t at TechEd you probably didn’t know.  Well now you will, because I am going to tell you all about them.  I must say, these controls are nothing less than AWESOME!

XamGantt

The XamGantt is a WPF and Silverlight cross-platform…

If you are building a WPF application, chances are you are using the MVVM pattern.  If you are using the MVVM pattern, I am sure you have discovered certain scenarios that become difficult to accomplish in a ViewModel when trying to respond to something in the View.  If you are building a WPF application, using MVVM, and using the Infragistics XamDataPresenter family of controls, then this post if for you.  Actually, if…

This is the fourth video in a series that will take you step-by-step on building a Prism application that mimics Microsoft Outlook.  In this video we create custom region adapters for the Infragistics XamRibbon and XamOutlookBar controls that are defined as regions in our application’s shell.

The code you really care about are the two region adapters.

XamRibbon

This is the third video in a series that will take you step-by-step on building a Prism application that mimics Microsoft Outlook. In this video we will create the first module in the application called the Mail module. We concentrate on just stubbing out the module project, creating a module catalog, adding the Mail module to it in the bootstrapper. We also inject our first navigation view, in the form of an Infragi…

This is the second video in a series that will take you step-by-step on building a Prism application that mimics Microsoft Outlook. In this video, I walk you through creating a shell for both the WPF and Silverlight platforms. This is a relatively short video, because shells are just so stinking easy. The only concept introduced in this video is a Region. A Region basically defines elements within your shell as containers…

This is the first video in a series that will take you step-by-step on building a Prism application that mimics Microsoft Outlook. This video covers how to setup a multi-platform Prism application that targets WPF and Silverlight. I show you how to setup your directory structure, as well as the solution/project structure inside Visual Studio. We also create a functional Silverlight and WPF shell application and see our…

Often when learning a technology you start by searching the web.  You look for videos, blogs, articles, samples, and examples.  What you start to realize is that everything you find is very simple “demo” code.  That’s code that shows how to implement a simple feature in a non-realistic demo.  Then you start looking for “production” code examples.  That’s code that represents a more realistic implementation…

Don’t want to read the article?  Watch the video tutorial on Xaml TV.

Prism provides 4 region adapters out of the box for you:

• ContentControlRegionAdapter
• SelectorRegionAdaptor
• ItemsControlRegionAdapter
• TabControlRegionAdapter (Silverlight only)

Well, what happens when you want to use a different control as a region host?  Simple.  You need to write a custom region adapter for it.  Is it hard you ask? 

I was monitoring my Twitter feed, like I always do, and saw a tweet come through asking about how to validate an object’s property against it’s parent ObservableCollection in the Infragistics XamDataGrid.  What this person was trying to accomplish was to validate a duplicate item in his data source.  They have a POCO object the implements the IDataErrorInfo interface, and an ObservableColletion<POCO> as the…

If you have done any WPF application development I am sure you have used and fallen in love with the Static markup extension.  If you’re are not familiar with it, the Static markup extension allows you to reference static fields and properties in your XAML markup.

For example; let’s assume we have a class with the following static field defined: