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LearnWPF.com - Goodbye battleship-grey

LearnWPF.com - Goodbye battleship-grey

XAML Complier has issues with linked xaml filesNovember 16

I thought I would post a short explanation of a small issue I encountered recently with the XAML compiler, in particular with its treatment of linked XAML files. Linked files can be created for all kinds of project files, most commonly code files like .cs or .vb files but it can be anything else. This is almost always done to when you need the same thing in multiple places but don't want to go to the trouble of managing two copies of it. They are added by changing the option in the open file dialog triggered when you choose "add existing item" in your project from 'add' to  'add as link' as shown below.

XAML files linked in this way will compile fine, but the relative path from the root of the project used as the key when retrieving them is lost when they are linked. Assuming we had a project structure like this. A project Foo contains a folder called resources, which in turn contains a XAML resource dictionary called stuff.xaml. Project Bar also has this same structure, but stuff.xaml has been added as a linked file from the Foo project.

If we open up these two using reflector we see that in F

AOL Silverlight-based RIA mail client debutsOctober 26

Hot on the heels of the Silverlight 2.0 release last week is a beta version of the AOL RIA mail clientpreviewed at Mix08 and built on Silverlight 2.0.

(I just signed up but who knew their contextual advertising would catch on so fast!) Although the beta is missing the "HALO" theme featured at Mix08, it does feature 3 themes including Onyx (the default, shown above) "classic" which is themed similarly to a number of other AOL web properties, and a Hubble space theme.

Cursory analysis of the app suggests the vast majority of it is built in silverlight, including (it seems) the editing widget which at the time of Mix08 was still being done with DHTML. We'll do more digging and let you know.

 

WPF Shader Effects Community Project Launched - http://www.codeplex.com/fxSeptember 8

The recent release of .NET 3.5 SP1 adds hardware-accelerated pixelshader effects to WPF. In addition to replacing a number of the slow software-rendered BitmapEffects with shiny, fast hardware-accelerated ones they also added the ability to write your own effects. In order to provide an easy-to-digest package for those who don't want to write shaders themselves, but DO want to add cool effects to their app I created a community shader project, hosted on codeplex at http://www.codeplex.com/fx . If you're a graphics wonk chances are you can write much cooler effects than the ones I've already build, so please feel free to contribute.

Here is an overview of the effects in the 0.1 release:

Negative Grayscale Sepia Bloom Motion Blur

Writing your first ShaderEffect for WPF 3.5 SP1May 15

WPF architect Greg Schechter was written a series of articles on the new hardware accelerated shaders recently released in beta form, as part of .NET 3.5 SP1 beta. This article includes some sample code that was enough to get me started down the path of writing a very simple shader effect - I've dubbed it "watery" but it's more just "wavy".

In this example the "waviness" of the effect is bound to the value of the slider at the bottom of the screen. One thing that I thought was very nicely done by the WPF team was the mechanism for passing parameters from WPF into the HLSL code using an attached property declaration like this:

public static readonly DependencyProperty WavinessProperty =
DependencyProperty.Register("Waviness", typeof(double), typeof(WaterEffect), new UIPropertyMetadata(0d, PixelShaderConstantCallback(0)));

Th

IE8 Beta 1 breaks Image Download in WPF applicationsMay 12

I ran into this issue when IE8 was first released and it doesn't seem to have gotten much visibility elsewhere. IE8 Beta 1 breaks image downloads for WPF applications when the image has a web uri. From the stack trace this seems to be caused by wininet.dll not returning the internet cache folder correctly. A typical call stack for the error message might look something like this (when the uri specified is a http uri, I haven't checked FTP)

A first chance exception of type 'System.ArgumentException' occurred in PresentationCore.dll System.ArgumentException: Value does not fall within the expected range. at System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.ThrowExceptionForHRInternal(Int32 errorCode, IntPtr errorInfo) at MS.Win32.WinInet.get_InternetCacheFolder() at System.Windows.Media.Imaging.BitmapDownload.BeginDownload(BitmapDecoder decoder, Uri uri, RequestCachePolicy uriCachePolicy, Stream stream) at System.Windows.Media.Imaging.LateBoundBitmapDecoder..ctor (Uri baseUri, Uri uri, Stream stream, BitmapCreateOptions createOptions, BitmapCacheOption cacheOption, RequestCachePolicy requestCachePolicy) at System.Windows.Media.Imaging.BitmapDecoder.CreateFromUriOrStream (Uri baseUri, Uri uri, Stream stream, BitmapCreateOptions createOptions, BitmapCacheOption cacheOption, RequestCachePolicy uriCachePolicy, Boolean insertInDecoderCache) at System.Windows.Media.Imaging.BitmapImage.FinalizeCreation() at System.Windows.Media.Imaging.BitmapImage.