Styling a ListBox aka Autopsy of a ListBox
For some reason, I keep ending up with restyled ListBoxes in my projects. I don’t know if it is because I lack imagination or if the ListBox is just such a useful control. Anyhow, it is a control that most people will use in a lot of projects and that often needs to be restyled. However useful it is, the layout is pretty stiff and Windowsy and unless you are going for that old school Windows look, you will most likely want to style it and make it a bit flashier. Unfortunately, after having had a look around the web, I still haven’t found a good resource explaining the innards of a ListBox, so I decided to create one. It might not be a complete one, but it will cover most of the things you need to make some serious layout changes… So here we go
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Changing the layout for the selected item in ListBox
I’m currently working on a Silverlight 2 application that will go on-line in about a week. It is not a big application, at least not if you look at the functionality in it, but it still has it’s challenges. Especially graphical ones. But this was one that I didn’t actually expect would cause a problem…
Our designer has worked up some nice layout that we need to implement. One of the features in the layout is a list of items that the user can select from. Obviously a ListBox. But the thing that caused problems, was the fact that it was supposed to show a compact information layout for all items except the selected item. The selected item should have a more verbose layout and some extra functionality. Initially that seemed like a tiny problem. That would just be a ItemTemplate with a VisualStateManager. Apparently not…!
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Creating custom controls in Silverlight - part 2
In part one, a button like control was created. It worked like a button, or at least a little. It was a square with a descriptive text and a brand new Click event. Unfortunately that doesn't really make it feel like a button. There is more to a button, especially in Silverlight and WPF. First off, a button normally gives some visual feedback to the user, confirming that it is pressed or that the button is hovering over it. That visual feedback is something that you find in most button implementation, whether it is in Windows Forms, HTML or WPF. The thing that is special with buttons in WPF and Silverlight is that the content of the button - in this case the descriptive text - can be anything. And I mean ANYTHING. It could be a Grid with several controls inside. Not that I would recommend doing some of the things that you CAN do, but it is possible. So in this part of the tutorial, the button will get visual feedback and support for complex content.
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Creating custom controls in Silverlight - part 1
After having written mhy previous entry about how to style and template controls, I guess it is a good time to have a look at how to create controls that are template- and styleable. (Can you write "template- and styleable"? Looks weird...well...I am swedish so I'm allowed to write less than perfect english) Unfortunately, due to my lack of imagination, I don't have a really cool control to build and show you. So instead I'm going to create a very limited control that will work more or less as a simple button.
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Storing application wide styles in external files, aka "The ExternalStyleManager"
A couple of the guys at my company have started working on an internal Silverlight application. One of the guys is a former WPF developer, which gives him some serious advantages when starting with Silverlight. It actually gives him some serious advantages compared to my own sorry ass as well. However, it has some downsides as well. Downsides that sometimes end up with him sending me annoyed MSN messages.
He expects a bunch of WPF specific features to be available in Silverlight. I understand the "confusing". SIlverlight development is very close to WPF, except for the fact that Silverlight is in some aspects is tiny compared to WPF.
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Silverlight 2 templating and styling
I have spent a lot of time checking out Silverlight and its features. I have also spent a lot of time talking about it to a lot of people. And a reasonably large amount of the people I have talked to, have asked me about templating and styling and about how it works and the differences. I myself also had a little uphill battle to sort out the terms and get going... So I thought I would write an post about it... Sort of explaining it from my view.
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