The Joy Of Programming

Technorati Tags: MediaPlayer Style , Theme , WPF , XAML , ControlTemplate Today I am sharing about a common usage of Slider control for the Timeline scenarios as we can see in many Media players. The above pictures shows timeline/scrubber control of some popular video players( Hulu and Youtube ). We can edit the Slider Style and ControlTemplate to create the same look and feel of the above two scrubbers except the preview value get displayed when we hover over. While figuring out an easy way to build this, I got two different options. The first and the obvious solution is to extend the Slider class to create a new custom control, which will have a new DependancyProperty called PreviewValue to hold the mouse over value. The biggest challenge in this approach is to make this control as much flexible(design and dev friendly) because people may customize the control by giving different Size and Margins to the Track and other parts of the Control template, which will make our assumpti...

Recently I found out that I have an old blog post about Control Templating a Button, getting a lot of hits. Many out there are looking for free control templates and themes for WPF/Silverlight applications. I am planning to publish few WPF/Silverlight themes in the coming posts. So here I am publishing a simple theme which has almost similar colors to the old blog post. It contains very basic set of controls.  1)Button 2)ToggleButton 3)ComboBox 4)TextBox 5)CheckBox 6)RadioButton 7)ScrollBar 8)ScrollViewer 9)ListBox 10)ProgressBar 11)Slider You can find the source XAML style here -   SunnyOrange_Theme.xaml WPF control theming and templating is very interesting and fun task in the WPF application development, it took only an hour or two for me to create this theme file. Please let me know your valuable feedbacks and suggestions .

I have often seen requirements to have a combobox with multiple selection enabled. We know thatWPF ListBox control is having two special properties, which enables the multiple selection but the combobox doesnt have those public IList SelectedItems { get; } public SelectionMode SelectionMode { get; set; } There are many ways we can make a multiselect combo box 1)Create a custom control from the scratch and have a Listbox in the dropdown 2)Extend the combobox and add the above properties to it 3)Edit the Combobox control template to add necessary controls and binding. I am going to describe the 3rd idea from the above list, which is a total Expression Blend work, so no need of VS2008 to make a multiselect combobox from a simple combobox. Place a combobox in to the editing area and right click on the control to create an copy of the Control template. Now you can see the Control's tree on the left side of Expression Blend The ItemPresenter inside the scrollviewer is actually the...