.Net Advanced Concepts

In response to WPF overview-Part-I , one of my friends and a .Net enthusiast herself, requested for details on ElementHost Class of WPF (this class gave her nightmares in not getting the Children attached to it). This might be true for many other developers who are specialized in Web Applications and  have lesser exposure to windows development. As a breather to all those folks, I am here exploring this class with sincere hopes that it will provide a good insight to the class.   ElementHost as described in MSDN is “a Windows Forms control that can be used to host a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) element” is located under System.Windows.Forms.Integration namespace . The members of this class have details available at this location . Why is this Class used? ElementHost control is used to place a WPF UIElement on to the Windows Forms control or form. In simple words, if a developer is using the traditional Windows forms and intends to use WPF controls, this control (class) is used...

This post is in continuation to the last post. In this Post I’ll be exploring the Following two topics Routed Events Data Binding Routed Events has been covered in this post Hence this post would be covering the details of DataBinding in WPF. I definitely wanted to write about this topic, However it’s always good not to “RE-Invent ” the wheel every single time it is required. So let me provide an excellent resource here that covers all possible aspects of the Binding in WPF. This series seems to be ending abruptly and my apologies if you felt this way, but I bet after reading the above link you’ll excuse me for this.  Hope this was helpful. Till next we connect…… Happy Learning.

This post is in continuation to the last post. In this Post I’ll be exploring the Dependency Properties Dependency properties are similar to CLR properties with more advanced and complex features. The main difference between the CLR properties and dependency properties is, that the value of a normal .NET property is read directly from a private member in your class, whereas the value of a DependencyProperty is resolved dynamically when calling the GetValue() method that is inherited from DependencyObject . In case this description did not make sense, no need to worry, It will become clear by the time you reach end of this article. How the Value is Resolved in Dependency properties Every time a dependency property is accessed, it internally resolves the value by following the precedence from high to low. It checks if a local value is available, if not, check if a custom style trigger is active and I the similar manner continues until it finds a value. At last the default value is alwa...

Windows presentation foundation (WPF) presents a unique paradigm that enables designers and developers to work independently and later on merge the work. This is facilitated by XAML (read more about XAML here) and the usual code behind file. WPF has a separate architecture (details here ), that needs to be understood before diving into the fancy terms like dependency properties, Bindings etc. Let us start with a quick review of Architecture.PresentationCore and Presentation Framework is the two main components that do most of the work in WPF. The Diagram below, depicts the complete architecture(This has been taken from MSDN)  There are three dlls which makes the Windows Presentation Foundation, that is WindowsBase (WindowsBase.dll), PresentationCore (PresentationCore.dll), and PresentationFoundation (PresentationFoundation.dll). First WPF component is milcore . MIL stands for Media Integration Layer . MIL is interface between DirectX and CLR (plus above layer). MILCORE is unmanaged com...

WPF (3.5) introduced the concept of Routing that made the event routing easies in the scenarios where it was tedious to handle events. Consider a scenario where there are a number of Hyperlinks in a Panel that direct to separate locations on Click. Now if this is done in normal programming, each hyperlink will have to have code for execution. It would be easier and cleaner if we could handle the hyperlinks in the container (the Panel) that handles the click and redirects to appropriate location. WPF handles the events with the following 3 strategies. Direct events are like ordinary .NET events. They originate in one element and don’t pass to any other. For example, MouseEnter is a direct event. Bubbling events are events that travel up the containment hierarchy. For example, MouseDown is a bubbling event. It is raised first by the element that is clicked. Next, it is raised by that element’s parent, and then by that element’s parent, and so on, until WPF reaches the top of the e...