I still remembered that when I worked at the Fetion , We were working very hard to build a coolest buddy list on the world. And we did it! But I can still remember the pain and endless over time working. Build a powerful buddy list is not an easy job at all.
But when I began to look at the TreeView the Silverlight provided , I found it could be a lot easier to build an online buddy list using this control.
I just wrote some simple lines of code , and I already can see the value to continue working on this control. It basically can fit in all our requirement at that time.
To build a TreeView using this control can be as simple as this:
1: TreeViewItem onlineItem = new TreeViewItem();
2: onlineItem.Header = "Online(2)";
3: TreeViewItem buddy1 = new TreeViewItem();
4: buddy1.Header = "Robert";
5: TreeViewItem buddy2 = new TreeViewItem();
6: buddy2.Header = "Robert Martin";
7: onlineItem.Items.Add(buddy1);
8: onlineItem.Items.Add(buddy2);
9: treeview.Items.Add(onlineItem);
10: TreeViewItem offlineItem = new TreeViewItem();
11: offlineItem.Header = "Offline(1)";
12: TreeViewItem offlineContact = new TreeViewItem();
13: offlineContact.Header = "Alex Wong";
14: offlineItem.Items.Add(offlineContact);
15: treeview.Items.Add(offlineItem);
When you add the the item, you can add any control you want, like the Textbox,Image,Label etc.
The running result is like
I can not stop myself to use this control to create a online chat application to compete with Windows Live Messenger :)
BTW:
After I posted my previous blog, I got an email from the Silverlight toolkit team and talked about the compiling problem the source code used to have. Thanks Jeff.