Paul Sheriff's Blog for the Real World

This blog is for my ramblings and to share my tips, tricks and advice garnered over 20+ years in the IT industry. I like to focus on topics that affect real-world business application developers.

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Creating a Base Window Class in WPF
Unlike Windows Forms, there is no Visual Inheritance in WPF. Luckily you don’t need visual inheritance as you can use User Controls to get a re-usable UI. There are times, however, when you want a base Window class so you can have common functionality...
Posted: Nov 02 2009, 03:42 PM by psheriff | with 3 comment(s)
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Create a Login Screen in Silverlight 3
After my last blog post on “Create a Login Window in WPF”, I had a lot of requests for how to create the same login screen in Silverlight 3. There are actually just a few changes that had to be made to get the same look in feel in Silverlight 3. Figure...
Create a Login Window in WPF
Most business applications require some sort of security system. You can always use Windows Authentication to authenticate a user, but sometimes you might want your own authentication scheme. When you do, you will need to create a login screen for your...
Posted: Oct 27 2009, 11:52 PM by psheriff | with 2 comment(s)
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Binding to Config Settings in WPF
Almost every application has a configuration file used to store global settings. What would be cool is to have a global settings class that reads this data from the .Config file, then can be used to bind to UI elements within your WPF application. This...
Posted: Oct 19 2009, 10:49 PM by psheriff | with no comments
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Creating Border-less Windows in WPF
When creating a splash screen or to just have a different look for the windows in your WPF application, you might wish to eliminate the border to give it a custom look (see Figure 1). This can be done very easily with WPF. Figure 1: A WPF window that...
Posted: Oct 12 2009, 10:24 AM by psheriff | with 2 comment(s)
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Using a WPF StackPanel for Business Forms
In WPF if you want to layout a typical business form like the one shown in Figure 1, most people would use a Grid control with rows and columns. However, you may also use a StackPanel control. While sometimes you might need the re-sizing capabilities...
Posted: Sep 30 2009, 02:27 PM by psheriff | with 2 comment(s)
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Split Name into First and Last
Not too long ago we received a text file of customer names. The problem with the file is it just had one field "Name". One of the requirements of our database application was to have a first name field and a last name field so our customer could search...
Date Handling Tip Part 2: Get the Month Name as Extension Method
After my last post on the GetMonthName, I had a question on how to add this method to the DateTime class as an Extension method. I thought this would make a good follow-up, so here is how you can accomplish this. First, let's do the C# extension method...
Date Handling Tip: Get the Month Name
There are a lot of great date handling methods attached to the DateTime class in .NET. However, if you wish to get information such as the current month name, you will not find it in this class. The reason is because .NET needs to take into account local...
Using The ConnectionStringBuilder class
Building a connection string from scratch can sometimes be a little daunting when you do not know the exact syntax. Of course, you can always visit www.connectionstrings.com and find some great help there. In lieu of this you can also use the ConnectionStringBuilder...
Posted: Sep 08 2009, 11:48 AM by psheriff | with 1 comment(s)
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