Alan Le's Vertigo Blog

Loading Resource Dictionaries from an External DLL

Alan Le — Sun, 11 May 2008 18:25:37 GMT

I had problems with the way skins were being referenced in Witty. To solve it, I moved the skins into their own project and needed to load them dynamically. To reference the resources, I use the Pack URI scheme. Typical you can load the skin resource dictionary with the following pack syntax.// Lo... (More)

How to fix "cannot locate resource window1.xaml"

Alan Le — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 10:25:47 GMT

Sometimes when you download WPF demo source code off the net and try to build it, you'll get the error "cannot locate resource window1.xaml". You can also get this error when converting a VS2005 project to a VS2008 project. Several people have asked me about this issue, which can be easil... (More)

WPF: How to filter ListBox items on the fly

Alan Le — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 16:38:39 GMT

Here's a simple example that I created to show how to make a ListBox control that has many items more manageable. As you type into the filter TextBox, the ListBox will only show the items that matches the filter. You can give the sample a try by clicking the XBAP link below. http://blogs.vertigosof... (More)

My WPF Bootcamp Presentation

Alan Le — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:12:17 GMT

Last week, I gave a presentation at the Microsoft's WPF Bootcamp in Redmond. My presentation, titled "WPF in Style", covered styling, templates, and User Experience in WPF. I describe my role as a Creative Developer at Vertigo and how we went about coming up with the design for Family.Sho... (More)

Cool Silverlight Stuff from Vertigo

Alan Le — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 17:50:00 GMT

If you missed it, Vertigo released two cool new samples last week for Microsoft. Slide.Show First up we have Slide.Show. Use this sample to show off your photos. I think that Silverlight is a great way to display interactive slide shows. I even submitted some photos to the Slide.Show project to incl... (More)

Keeping XAML Clean

Alan Le — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:00:16 GMT

One of the early goals we had we Family.Show was to make the XAML files easy to read and understandable. I want to share the list of some of the little things that we did to keep our XAML clean. I will be using the MainWindow.xaml page as an example. Clean Tag We placed the xmlns (xm... (More)

Spell Checking in WPF

Alan Le — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 17:53:59 GMT

Witty is one of the few Twitter clients that has a built-in spell checker. How hard was it to implement? What if I told you that in WPF, spell-checking is just a checkbox? Here's the Xaml.

Displaying your family tree from Geni.com in Family.Show

Alan Le — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 15:08:29 GMT

Geni.com is a great way to build your family tree collaboratively with other family members. Since both Geni.com and Family.Show support the Gedcom 5.5 format, we can easily take the family trees built on Geni.com and display it in Family.Show. This post will show you how. Here's How Build your fam... (More)

What's New in WPF 3.5?

Alan Le — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 14:11:50 GMT

If you're like me, you're interested in what's new for WPF in the .NET 3.5 Framework after installing VS2008. Luckily there's already many resources available all about. By far the most comprehensive information is on MSDN at the What's New in Windows Presentation Foundation Version 3.5 article. The... (More)

WPF Resource Organization: Organized As Separate Files By Type vs Single File?

Alan Le — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 14:38:11 GMT

In the process of developing Family.Show, I noticed that we were starting to create lots of XAML resources such as brushes, styles, and data templates. My thinking at the time was to separate the resources into separate files organized by functional type to make them easier to find. For example, al... (More)