Download sources, binaries, and sample application (Version: 1.0.1, 2013.11.22)

A few years ago, I posted an article that leveraged markup extensions to quickly show localized ToolTips with minimal effort. Fast forward to 2013: I still like ToolTips, but interactive / clickable ones would be nice, and there’s Blend Behaviors that provides developers with a great design-time experience. As a result, I wrote a simple control and a complementary Blend Behavior that get’s me quite a bit of flexibility with minimal impementation effort.

The behavior allows you very easily create simple ToolTips like this:

However, it doesn’t stop there. The following Blend Behavior generates an error ToolTip:

Also, unlike the built-in ToolTip service, the behavior supports interactive/clickable ToolTips. As the ToolTip takes arbitary XAML or a user control for Content or Header properties, you can display arbitrary controls on the popup.

Features at a glance:

• Blend Behavior with design-time support – you can setup rich ToolTips within Blend in a matter of seconds.
• Unlike regular ToolTips, those are clickable – you can put interactive content such as buttons or Hyperlinks on them.
• Built-in header / content support.
• Data Binding and MVVM-friendly.
• Content and header not limited to text.
• Built-in themes: You can show a ToolTip as an information, warning, or error.
• If bound to strings, values can be formatted on the fly using the HeaderStringFormat and ContentStringFormat properties.
• Disabling ToolTips through a bindable IsEnabled flag.

Some final notes: I didn’t make everything configurable – that would have been overkill for the scope of a ToolTip. Instead, I recommend you to tweak the control styles to your needs. Things you might want to change:

• When being displayed, ToolTips are slightly transparent – full opacity is only set if you hover over them. You can easily adjust this in the animation that fades in the control.
• If you shorten the delay in which the ToolTip is being displayed remarkably, you should also adjust animations (fade-in / fade-out in order to not cut them off.
• Placement of the ToolTip’s popup (near Mouse pointer) is currently hardcoded in the Behavior class.

Happy coding 🙂

I’m currently working on VFS, a virtual file system. For running transfers, VFS internally maintains locks that do have expiration time. Accordingly, I found myself in need for a job scheduling mechanism in order to properly release expired locks. I looked around for a few alternatives, but eventually ended up writing my own lightweight version.

Features:

• Simple scheduling and callback mechanisms
• Silverlight compatible
• Lightweight
• Fluent API
• Detection of system time changes with optional rescheduling
• Optional forwarding of exceptions during job execution
• Open Source (Ms-PL)

Download library and sample

Current Version: 1.0.2, 2010.01.12

What Does it Do?

Basically, the library allows you to create a job, and submit that job to a scheduler, along with a callback action. This callback action is invoked as soon (or every time) the job is due.

Before going into the details, here’s a first code snippet that creates a simple Job that is supposed to run repeatedly (every 1.5 seconds) for a minute. Once the job is created, it is submitted to a Scheduler instance which processes the job and makes sure the submitted callback action is being invoked every time the job is due:

private Scheduler scheduler = new Scheduler();

public void RunOnce()
{
  //define a start / end time
  DateTime startTime = DateTime.Now.AddSeconds(5);
  DateTime endTime   = startTime.AddSeconds(60);

  //configure the job
  Job consoleJob = new Job();
  consoleJob.Run.From(startTime)
                .Every.Seconds(1.5)
                .Until(endTime);

  //submit the job with the callback to be invoked
  scheduler.SubmitJob(consoleJob, j => Console.Out.WriteLine("hello world"));
}

Silverlight

The project provides class libraries for .NET 3.5 and Silverlight 3, along with a Silverlight sample application that shows how to add scheduling functionality to your SL application with just a few lines of code.

While long-term scheduling isn’t probably something you need to do in a Silverlight application, the scheduler simplifies the management of periodic jobs, such as polling a server for updates. Below is a snippet from the Silverlight sample application. This job starts immediately, and runs indefinitely with an interval of 2 seconds:

private void CreateJob2()
{
  //create job
  Job<int> job = new Job<int>("Job 2");
  job.Data = 0;
  job.Run.Every.Seconds(2);

  //submit to scheduler
  scheduler.SubmitJob(job, LogJobExecution);
}


private void LogJobExecution(Job<int> job, int data)
{
  //updates user interface
}

Jobs

A job is a simple configuration item for the scheduler. There’s two built-in job types: Job and Job<T>. The only difference between the two is that the latter provides a Data property which allows you to attach state information directly to the job and have it delivered back to you when the job runs.

Read more…