akjoshi's Blog

Agent Smith for Resharper

2013-04-04T04:45:00Z

Recently I started using a plug-in for ReSharper: Agent Smith . Although its pretty old tool but somehow there was no solid requirement for using it, so I never tried it. It looks very powerful and useful tool; for the start we are majorly using it’s spell checker feature; one major benefit of using it instead of other spell checkers is that it is compatible with the ReSharper Settings Manager and thus sharing ignored words across team becomes easier. Another benefit is that we can easily control...(read more)

Focus management Tips & Tricks for nested ListView's part 1

2013-01-15T06:28:00Z

Hi, as every WPF developer would agree with me that handling focus in WPF is a nightmare and every now and then you come across scenarios which makes you pull your hair I recently came across one(more) such scenario and it was a tough task to make focus work properly, I think it will be useful to blog about my experience and solutions I have implemented, so here is the first and easiest part of this series. Scenario : I had a control which consists of nested ListView’s i.e. a parent ListView which...(read more)

Effect of Coffee on our ability to code

2013-01-15T06:07:00Z

I hope the effect of coffee is not same on our ability to code In 1995 a group of NASA scientists repeated and refined some earlier tests on the effect that various drugs have on the web building abilities of the common garden spider. They tested the effect of caffeine, benzedrine, marijuana and chloral hydrate and as you can see the results were pretty extreme! Noever, R., J. Cronise, and R. A. Relwani. 1995. Using spider-web patterns to determine toxicity. NASA Tech Briefs 19(4):82. http://en.wikipedia...(read more)

Finding last visual parent in VisualTree

2013-01-11T06:45:00Z

Recently I had a requirement where I needed to find the last parent of a particular type in VisualTree. You can easily find an implementation to find the parent but was not able to find one for finding the top most parent of a given type. So I modified the current implementation to get the last parent of a given type in the hierarchy, which was not tough at all. This method is useful when you can have multiple parents of same type in hierarchy and you need to find the top most parent of type T, e...(read more)

Excel cell behavior for WPF TextBox

2012-12-27T08:16:00Z

Excel cells have a very special and useful behavior that they become editable as soon as it gets selected but it doesn't changes its visual appearance i.e. caret doesn't becomes visible. User can start typing into it or use Enter or Arrow keys to move around, caret becomes visible as soon as user starts typing into it. Let's implement this behavior for WPF TextBox....(read more)

Resolving harmless binding errors in WPF II : 2 approaches for removing data binding errors due to heterogeneous types in a hierarchical view

2012-12-18T12:20:00Z

This is a continuation post to my previous post Resolving harmless binding errors in WPF in which I talked about various ways of resolving different binding errors etc. I recently came across another situation in which we get these binding errors and how they can be resolved. Problem: If you have a tree with 2 types of items in it and you use different DataTypes for each of them, then you will get binding errors because of missing Properties in either one of the item. In our case we had binding...(read more)

Making animations work for disabled controls

2012-06-13T11:24:00Z

Some animations don't work if control on which animation is applied is disabled, this post explains a workaround to make animations work on disabled controls. ...(read more)

Outrageous Work Conditions for a Developer analyst

2012-06-07T11:57:00Z

Recently came across a job opening sent to me by a HR person on LinkedIn; The service based company is a very big name in IT but the work conditions mentioned in the job description were extremely unusual - I mean who the hell would like to apply for a job where a company wants you to be ready for lifting and transporting of computers, that too on top of extended work hours and weekends. I used to think that JD’s are supposed to encourage candidates to join the company but this one here looks totally...(read more)

Attached Behavior for auto scrolling containers while doing Drag & Drop

2012-05-28T07:31:00Z

This is a very common problem in WPF, if you support Drag & Drop within your Items control or across the controls like ListView, TreeView etc. and your List contains hundreds of items then it’s very hard to drag an item at the bottom to the top......(read more)

Working on WPF application Memory Profiling

2012-04-09T08:51:00Z

Today, I am going to start with the task of memory profiling the WPF application, on which I am working from past few months. I have successfully done this in past, fixing a lot of memory leaks and improving the performance of WPF applications; As in past, I am hopeful of fixing some very interesting bugs and improve the application performance. I am very excited as current application is very different from the previous WPF applications I had profiled, all the previous application were pure WPF...(read more)

WPF DataGrid Customization: Resizing Row/Column through DataGridCell gridlines

2012-03-28T08:52:00Z

In this post I am going to share my experience on how I achieved the functionality to resize DataGrid row/column from any cell in that row (not just the row header). We needed this functionality as our user can hide the DataGrid headers and it is not possible to resize the rows/columns after that....(read more)

Importance of specifying AncestorType with x:Type in RelativeSourceBinding

2012-02-03T08:26:00Z

I am really very happy right now, for the past 4 days me and my team were trying to solve a very trivial bug in our application and finally it got resolved by just adding x:Type in our RelativeSource bindings; Can you believe this, a production issue getting resolved just by this simple change, I couldn’t; so I tested this fix at least ten times to believe it Just to give you a background, I am working on developing components for a very large scale financial product having plug-in architecture and...(read more)

Getting rid of heavy Multivalue Converters : My Encounter with Win Form style WPF apps 2

2012-01-15T14:46:00Z

I recently came across the situation where I had to refactor the WPF code written in Win Forms Style ; Code was having a lot of MultiValueConverters used for building the DataContext / ItemSources for Controls/ ListVies/ DataGrids etc. Following is the example of one of the converters I am talking about: < ListView.ItemsSource > < MultiBinding Converter ="{StaticResource ItemsSourceInsertConverter}" > < Binding ElementName ="EditorControl" Path ="EditorControl...(read more)

Creating custom filters in Resharper To-do Explorer

2012-01-04T09:06:00Z

We can create a custom filter in Resharper To-Do explorer to filter out all the to-do items created by a specific person or with a particular string literal. This is very useful in case you are working in a big team and have habit to add To-do comments. Here are the steps to create a new filter with a specific string - Step 1 : Go to Resharper –> Options -> Tools -> To-do Items Step 2 : Create a new Pattern, enter title and the regular expression for strings you want to search – Step 3 ...(read more)

Resolving harmless binding errors in WPF

2011-11-30T13:31:00Z

While developing WPF applications, you will notice a lot of binding errors being displayed in output window. I also faced this problem and tried a lot of things to get to the root cause of the problem. It was very frustrating as AncestorLevel is not used anywhere in code! and I was not able to find the place in code which is responsible for these errors. Even after searching the various forums and articles there was no solution for this problem; but this was a very common issue and cause of this problem mentioned here, here and here is: ...(read more)