Lord of the Converters

…One Converter to bring them all and in the XAML bind them…

Last time, I briefly mentioned a WPF converter that I created that helps solve the Cambrian Explosion problem that comes with creating specialized converters. Today I’ll go over that converter and what makes it tick.

Extreme DRYness

I ran across an interesting scenario at work today that I think merits some discussion. In this post, I’ll cover what DRY is, and when following it religiously may actually cause problems.

C# 7 Features I Don’t Like

It’s that time again! Time for my inner grumpy old man to come out and describe all that is wrong with the development of C# as a language!

They think of everything!

Ordinarily I like to pontificate on the merits (or detriments) of particular code design decisions. Instead today, I’d like to share a neat consequence of C# 6 that I found the other day.

Reinventing the Wheel

It’s an age-old question that just about every WPF developer has asked: How can I bind an event to a command?

Handling Errors from Plug-ins

Before we get into today’s topic, I have some sadness to report. My beloved Dallas Stars were eliminated from the NHL playoffs. Also, my favorite player, Trevor Daley, who now plays for the Pittsburgh Penguins, has suffered a broken ankle and will not be able to play in the Stanley Cup games. Happily, if the Penguins win the Cup, he’ll still get his name engraved on its holy base!

Anyway, enough of that. Let’s get on to software.

Last time we built a very simple pluggable program where each plugin provides a translation of the string Hello, World! Today, we’re going to explore some of the problems inherent in our approach.

A Plug-in Primer

First of all, I’m sorry. It’s been a while. I committed to writing this blog, and I got a little lazy. That’s not to say that I haven’t been really busy, though.

Secondly, I’d like to say… LET’S GO STARS!!! (The Dallas Stars are currently in the Stanley Cup playoffs after having won the Western Conference and coming in #2 in the NHL during the regular season!)

Okay. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get on with this blog post.

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Today, we’re going to embark on a new journey: building WPF applications that support plugins. There are a number of ways to build plugable applications, and I recently had the opportunity to play around with a few ideas. In this series we’ll explore some of our options and their merits. But first, let’s look at what a plug-in is.

Architecture Always Applies

I recently ran into an issue with Nuget packages. At work, we have a private Nuget repository for code that we’d like to share across applications. It’s mostly common frameworks, like configuration and logging.

WPF Miller Columns, Part 2

Last time, I walked through an implementation of Miller Columns in WPF that I had posted on StackOverflow, but it ended with a few issues.

• It was incomplete. I didn’t post the entire implementation, and much of the context was lost between then and now.
• The implementation wasn’t very MVVM. It required a specific type to be used as a data context, whereas in MVVM proper, the view model should be completely decoupled from the view.
• The solution required a code behind. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I’d like to see if we can develop a pure-XAML solution.

WPF Miller Columns, Part 1

Today we’re going to look at a very useful UI element: Miller Columns. If you’ve ever worked in a Mac environment, you’ll probably recognize this from the Finder’s column view.