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 wanted to officially release Sketchables weeks ago, but business just got in the way – and it turned out that my plan to just working at night / on weekends didn’t work either because, well, business got in the way there, too.

However, my deadline ends in little more than a week (and I’ll have quite some time at my hands in August), so I’ll be able to finally package Sketchables, record some more videos, and of course add a few goodies. For now, I’ve prepared a preview release of the package which already works quite solid:

Sketchables Preview

If you compare this package to the contents in the YouTube video, the most prominent addition is built-in navigation support which gives you point-and-click navigation, and allows you to trigger other actions for a Sketchable’s items:

(Click on screenshot to show in full size)

As always, critical feedback is appreciated – happy sketching! 🙂

Unlike the .NET platform, Silverlight only provides two text encodings out of the box: UTF-8 (UTF8Encoding class) and UTF-16 (UnicodeEncoding class).

Accordingly, if you find yourself in a situation where you need to encode or decode data with another encoding (e.g. iso-8859-1), you’ll have to write your own Encoding class (or delegate the work to a server-side service).

I found myself in this exact situation yesterday, and came up with a little tool which automates the process. The Encoding Generator is a WPF application which takes the name or code page of a well known encoding, and generates source code for a custom Encoding class which compiles under Silverlight.

Get Source Code

Get Compiled Executable

Current version: 1.0.0, 2010.03.31, requires .NET 3.5 SP1 or higher

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How Does It Work?

Specifying the Encoding

In order to specify the encoding you want to use, you can either enter the name or numeric code page of a well-known encoding. As soon as you enter a valid value, some information for the encoding is being displayed in the right hand border you can see on the screenshot.

As a sample for valid encoding names or code pages, here’s some values you can enter in order to tell the tool to generate an iso-8859-1 encoder (see screenshot):

• iso-8859-1 (name)
• latin1 (name)
• 28591 (code page)

A list of encodings can be found here.

Fallback Character

The tool gives you the option to specify a fallback character value, which is used as a default in case a character or byte value is being processed during encoding/decoding. In case you don’t specify the character, the encoding class will crash at runtime should it receive data that cannot be properly encoded or decoded.

Single-Byte Encoding Limitation

The generated class only works if a single byte can be translated into a single character and vice versa. Accordingly, if you try to generate code for an encoding that uses several bytes per (e.g. utf-8) character, the generator shows an error message.

Byte Range

You need to specify the byte range of the encoding. For example, ASCII supports only 128 characters, and therefore has a byte range of 128 bytes. Most other encodings support a byte range of 256 bytes, though. 256 is the maximum value that can be specified, as a single byte cannot deliver more values (the byte data type covers a numeric range from 0 – 255).

Testing

The generator also creates an NUnit test class that compares the results of the generated class against the original encoding. Accordingly, this test class is supposed to run in a regular .NET environment, not in Silverlight (if the original encoding that is used in the test was available in SL, you wouldn’t have to generate a custom encoding class in the first place…).

Internals

At runtime, the following is happening: Basically, the generator maintains mapping tables to do the encoding and decoding from characters to bytes and vice versa. Fore every request, it just looks up the translation tables for every supported character/byte value of the encoding.

The generator creates these translation tables on the fly in the form of a static array and dictionary.

Performance

The library doesn’t contain any performance tweaks and performs much slower than the built-in encodings that rely on all sorts of black magic. However, as long as you don’t have to encode or decode huge amounts of data, this shouldn’t be noticeable.

Here’s the results from my machine for 10000 iterations:

• Encoding the whole character table to a byte array (256 characters)
  • 17 milliseconds with the built-in encoding
  • 94 milliseconds with the generated encoding
• Decoding the bytes back into a string
  • 2 milliseconds with the built-in encoding
  • 46 milliseconds with the custom encoding

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…

I’ve been working on a new project of mine for a while now, and opened the project at CodePlex: VFS, the Virtual File System, is basically an abstraction to arbitrary hierarchical resources, which can be handled like a file system.

VFS comes with a set of file system providers and clients (including Silverlight support), and allows you to easily write your own providers (e.g. to expose the contents of a ZIP file on a remote server). Additional offerings are flexible security (e.g. to access your Azure blobs via VFS in order to plug-in a custom authorization scheme), auditing and reliable file transfers.

VFS is currently in early Alpha, but I’m working full steam ahead. Comments and wish lists are appreciated! For a more detailed introduction and a few code snippets, visit the project home:
http://vfs.codeplex.com

I just released a minor update for NetDrives, which fixes an issue that caused settings not to be persisted correctly. NetDrives is a Windows utility that helps you manage your network shares and mapped network drives.

Download and further infos: http://www.hardcodet.net/netdrives