Custom TreeView Layout in WPF

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This article discusses how to customize the item layout in a WPF TreeView. The layout we will examine is quite similar to an "org chart", where each level of items is displayed in a horizontal row directly beneath their respective parent. Along the way we will see how the power of templates and styles in WPF can provide incredible flexibility for customizing an application's user interface.

This article is not for WPF beginners. It assumes that you already have knowledge of XAML, control templates, styles, triggers, hierarchical data templates, data binding, and other fundamentals of WPF.

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WPF ribbon control

Company: devcomponents.com

Wpf-Ribbon™ is the fully compliant Office 2007 style Ribbon control developed from ground-up for Windows Presentation Foundation

We released world's first Ribbon control for Windows Forms back in 2005 and using that experience and new WPF platform we developed world's first WPF Ribbon control. Wpf-Ribbon™ is designed for developing professional business applications with WPF.

Partial list of Wpf-Ribbon™ features:

• Supports all required Office 2007 UI design elements. For details see below...
• Automatic intelligent Ribbon resizing
• Application menu support
• Contextual groups support
• Complete Galleries support
• Office 2007 styling for controls included, like ComboBox, StatusBar etc.
• KeyTips support
• Windows Vista Glass Support
• Predefined color schemes Blue, Silver, Black
• Create unlimited custom color schemes based on single color and one of our predefined color tables
• Ribbon popup menu support
• Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) with customization
• Excellent integration with WPF Routed Commands
• Right-To-Left (RTL) fully supported
• XBAP support, use it in your Click-Once XBAP applications

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Professional Docking Control for WPF

Company: devcomponents.com

Wpf-Dock is world's first Windows Presentation Foundation docking control with Office 2007 style developed from ground up to take advantage of new presentation layer.

We designed Wpf-Dock with simplicity in mind. We reduced number of classes you need to get familiar with to use the control and we carefully evaluated each property and method that is exposed on the control. Advanced docking layout engine we developed gets out your way and allows you to create very complex docking layout easily.

Here is just partial list of Wpf-Dock features:

• Fully featured docking including Document docking
• Easy document and docking window switching using Ctrl+Tab keys
• Diamond docking guides for easy docking
• Intelligent animation for docking transitions
• Auto-hide capability
• Save and Restore docking layout easily
• Office 2007 Blue, Silver, Black styling included
• Create unlimited custom color schemes based on single color and one of our predefined color tables
• Right-To-Left (RTL) fully supported
• XBAP support, use it in your Click-Once XBAP applications

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Actipro Ribbon - WPF .NET Control

Company: Actipro

Demo

Actipro Ribbon is a control suite that implements an Office 2007-like user interface for the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and meets all of the core Microsoft licensing requirements for implementation of a ribbon user interface.

Ribbon has been designed from the ground up to follow WPF best practices, be extremely configurable, use a command-driven model, and allow for reproduction of nearly all the user interface features found in Office.

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SandDock Window manager

Company: divelements.com

SandDock is our award-winning window management software that enables dockable window and tabbed document functionality in applications that use it. The version for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is able to leverage new technology to provide more visual features than its Windows Forms counterpart, such as smoothly animated transitions and 3D window switching - like the Flip-3D feature from Microsoft Windows Vista.

Broadly designed to mimic the user interface capabilities of Visual Studio 2005, by plugging SandDock into your application you can forget about the intricacies of window layout - instead, provide your windows to SandDock and let it present them with all the tools your users need for customization of the working area. Tool windows become dockable, sticking to the sides of your window in hierarchies chosen visually by the user, or they can be floated above your main window. Documents are presented in a tabbed fashion, with split views for easy comparison between content, or in a traditiona multiple document interface (MDI) layout.

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XCEED DataGrid for WPF

Company: xceed.com

Demo (This demo requires Internet Explorer and .NET 3.0 or Vista)

1. Not only the most poweful grid of its kind—with more features than any other offering—but also clearly the fastest, with a remarkably flexible and extensible object model, and reusable parts (datepicker / calendar control). Yet the standard version is absolutely free and fully functional! More than fills the void of the “missing” WPF grid: try it live here!
2. Feature-rich! True lookless, 100% stylable and templatable WPF control; rich in-place editing; powerful grouping with UI virtualization; table and card views, with all Windows OS themes; a custom CollectionView for fine-grained control over the underlying data source; customizable group-level configurations with header and footer support.
   
3. Outperforms anything else on the market! Can handle thousands and even hundreds of thousands of records at once.

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xamDataPresenter

Company: infragistics

Whatever complex data constitutes the "it" in your application, the xamDataPresenter control for Windows® Presentation Foundation (WPF) is your one stop solution with its pluggable view architecture. Field layouts and template support make easy work of showing the data fields you want, where and how you want them. When the situation calls for a hierarchical data grid in traditional tabular format you plug in its GridView for all the features of the Infragistics xamDataGrid control like sort and group by field, add, edit, and delete records, and bands of nested child data records.

Alternately, the xamDataPresenter accepts a CarouselView to take advantage of data records moving along an animated path, special visual effects that will enthrall your users, and all the features of the Infragistics xamDataCarouselTM control. What about the next phenomenal presentation format that doesn't exist, yet? Choose the xamDataPresenter control for its open and extensible view architecture to prepare your presentation today for the next great thing tomorrow.

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Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries

Scott Guthrie announced that Microsoft will be providing
source code of the .NET Framework libraries with the .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 release later this year.

They are offering the source code (with source file comments included) for the

1. .NET Base Class Libraries (System, System.IO, System.Collections, System.Configuration, System.Threading, System.Net, System.Security, System.Runtime, System.Text, etc)
2. ASP.NET (System.Web)
   
3. Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms)
4. ADO.NET (System.Data)
5. XML (System.Xml)
6. WPF (System.Windows).
   

They will then be adding more libraries in the months ahead (including WCF, Workflow, and LINQ). The source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL).

Developers will be able to download the .NET Framework source libraries via a standalone install (allowing you to use any text editor to browse it locally). Microsoft will also provide integrated debugging support of it within VS 2008.

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WPF Tutorial

With all the new technology that Microsoft is releasing, it's hard to keep up. WPF is one such technology. It is a completely different metaphor for user interface construction than previous frameworks. This article is intended to give a general overview of the key concepts and innovations of WPF, hopefully educating readers enough to make intelligent UI technology decisions and smooth the learning curve for those beginning to work with this framework.

Introduction

Windows Presentation Foundation (hereafter referred to as WPF) is a new API for creating graphical user interfaces for the Windows platform. It is an alternative to WinForms that further empowers developers by providing an API capable of taking full advantage of the multimedia facilities of the modern PC. Unlike WinForms, it does not wrap Win32 but is completely new, built from the ground up using .NET. The fundamental power of WPF comes from the fact that it is vector based, hardware accelerated and resolution independent.

Reminiscent of WinForms, you’ll find many of the controls you are used to when building applications: Button, ComboBox, ListBox, etc. However, in WPF, your UI design is represented in a completely different fashion. Instead of using a designer generated code file or a resource file as the source of a UI definition, WPF uses XML. Specifically, it uses XAML. Please, don’t let this frighten or dissuade you. It’s surprisingly intuitive and much easier than you would think (not to mention fun). There are many other new features in WPF, too many to discuss in this tutorial. Below, you can see a chart depicting what I consider to be some of the most important features/innovations in WPF.

Figure 1: Important WPF Features



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