UV Outliner 1.3 is out

Finally, my tiny WPF project is released. It is UV Outliner.

I am a big fan of outliners.

It is astonishing what amount of information in our everyday life has a hierarchical nature.
I always wanted to be able to play with such information. Plans for life or for the day, travel information, meeting schedules, business plans, novels, or even blog posts are all examples of hierarchical information.

So I decided to share the results of my work with other people like me.

I hope UV Outliner will become a part of your life and will help you to be more productive.

http://uvoutliner.com

Correct way to keep selection in TextBox and RichTextBox visible after focus lost in WPF

WPF controls: TextBox and RichTextBox have no HideSelection property. Due to this, it is a bit tricky to make them to show selection after focus lost.

There are two possible solutions.

1. Defining separate focus scope in XAML
2. Adding and event handler (LostFocus) and set Handled property of RoutedEventArgs to true in code.

As the second one seems to be tricky, I will show how to implement this behavior with the first concept:

<Window
 xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
 xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml">

<StackPanel>
<TextBox Margin="5">Some text here</TextBox>

<StackPanel Grid.Row="1" FocusManager.IsFocusScope="True">
  <ComboBox Margin="5">
  <ComboBoxItem IsSelected="True">123</ComboBoxItem>
  <ComboBoxItem>123</ComboBoxItem>
  </ComboBox>
</StackPanel>
</StackPanel>

</Window>

This code will create window with two controls (TextBox and ComboBox):

As you can see, both controls can have focus simultaneously. This happens because of the FocusManager.IsFocusScope property set to true which makes second control to be in a separate focus scope.

However, if new window is opened, focus on both controls will be lost.

You can read more about focus management in WPF here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa969768.aspx

How to insert image into FlowDocument at runtime

To insert image into FlowDocument at runtime you can use the following code:

FlowDocument document = new FlowDocument();
Image image = new Image();
BitmapImage bimg = new BitmapImage();
bimg.BeginInit();
bimg.UriSource = new Uri("c:\temp\image.png", UriKind.Absolute);
bimg.EndInit();
image.Source = bimg;
document.Blocks.Add(new BlockUIContainer(image));


How to set initial focus to specific WPF control in XAML

Setting initial focused control in WPF is easy. Just use the FocusManager.FocusedElement attached property:

<Window FocusManager.FocusedElement="{Binding ElementName=MyEdit}" > 
   <TextBox Name="MyEdit" />
</Window>

Auto-incremented version in AssemblyInfo

Visual Studio 2008 can increment build version for you. Just specify "*" in the AssemblyInfo.cs. For example:

[assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.0.0.*")]

Table-like view in XAML using grid and border

Someone (as I do) may wish to create a table-like layout in XAML as this:


Additionally, I want the thickness of lines to be 1 point everywhere, and I don't want to use FlowDocument.

At first glance it seems to be obvious, however, I have found no straightforward way to implement such layout because of the two reasons:

• Grid has no "border" property
• One cannot create border with invisible side (update: this is not true, read comments below)
  

So I have to use the hack which was introduced in HTML: create Grid with dark background and fill every column of it with white background. The margins of columns define the thickness of the table borders.

The code will be like this:

<Grid Background="#BBBBBB" Margin="18">
<Grid.RowDefinitions>
  <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/>
  <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/>         
</Grid.RowDefinitions>
<Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
  <ColumnDefinition Width="*"/>
  <ColumnDefinition Width="*"/>
</Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
  <Border Grid.ColumnSpan="2" Margin="1" Background="White" Height="20" SnapsToDevicePixels="True">
  <TextBlock Margin="4,2,2,2" VerticalAlignment="Center" Foreground="#666666" HorizontalAlignment="Center">some text</TextBlock>
</Border>
<Border Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="0" Margin="1,0,0,1" Background="White" Height="50" SnapsToDevicePixels="True">
</Border>
<Border Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="1" Margin="1,0,1,1" Background="White" Height="50" SnapsToDevicePixels="True">
</Border>
</Grid>

PageFunction and attached attribute Resources

It is convenient to embed resources in the page using attached property "Resources". However, due to the bug in XAML parser it is a bit confusing to use this property with PageFunction.

To make it works, you should define Resources property on the Page class instead of PageFunction.

   1:  <PageFunction>

   2:     <Page.Resources>

   3:        ...

   4:     </Page.Resources>

   5:   

   6:      ...

   7:   

   8:  </PageFunction>