Re: PRISM in Silverlight - WPF Discussion Boards

15-Apr-11 1:59

Code Project author and Prism team member Karl Shifflett has literally written the book on Prism development. Check out his blog[^], and order the book.

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Re: PRISM in Silverlight

Abhinav S15-Apr-11 17:58

Abhinav S

15-Apr-11 17:58

MVVM does complement Prism.

Prism give you an opportunity to work in a more decoupled UI / code environment while giving you necessary framework features to call these framework features.

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WPF PopUp control

Rahul Chitte14-Apr-11 1:59

Rahul Chitte

14-Apr-11 1:59

Hi,

I have just started learning WPF and exploring more on WPF controls.

Can any one help how to display popup? I have used TextBlock under popup control as below :

<pre> <Popup StaysOpen="True">
<TextBlock Name="txtBlock1">
This is simple PopUp in WPF..
</TextBlock>
</Popup></pre>

But how to trigger this popup?

Thanks and regards,
Rahul Chitte

Pete O'Hanlon14-Apr-11 2:20

14-Apr-11 2:20

Popups are shown with the IsOpen method.

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Ian Shlasko14-Apr-11 3:19

Ian Shlasko

14-Apr-11 3:19

Two ways:

1) Give it a name (The Popup itself, not just the TextBlock), and open it in the code-behind

2) (The preferred method) Bind the Popup's IsOpen property to something else, such as a toggle button or a boolean field on your underlying model.

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Abhinav S14-Apr-11 3:32

Abhinav S

14-Apr-11 3:32

This sample [^]could help you out.

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Tarun.K.S14-Apr-11 3:50

Tarun.K.S

14-Apr-11 3:50

That's a good example! Thumbs Up | :thumbsup:

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My Blog![^]

Another Dummies question (sorry)

Abhinav S14-Apr-11 4:05

Abhinav S

14-Apr-11 4:05

Thank you Tarun.

The funniest thing about this particular signature is that by the time you realise it doesn't say anything it's too late to stop reading it.

Johnny J.14-Apr-11 0:53

14-Apr-11 0:53

OK; I have digested the depressing news I got in my "Data Access for Dummies" thread below and accepted that I need to create a Silverlight 4 client app and a WCF host service that supplies the data.

SFSG!

Of course, I want to create a common class library containing the DTO class definitions so that the host and the client can share the same definitions.

BUT!!! If I create a Silverlight class library, I can't use Ado objects to access the db (which I want to do), and if I create a "normal" windows class library, I can't reference it in my Silverlight client app.

So how can I do that???

Beidh ceol, caint agus craic againn - Seán Bán Breathnach
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Pete O'Hanlon14-Apr-11 1:33

14-Apr-11 1:33

Do you know how WCF works? I'm not being funny, I'm just trying to find a common basepoint here. If you have your Silverlight app needing to know about Ado types, then you have just put a hard dependency in which means that your service could not be consumed by other types of systems (such as Java ones) that have no knowledge of the Ado types.

You create your model as a DataContract. Here's an example:

namespace WcfServer
{
    using System;
    using System.Runtime.Serialization;

    /// <summary>
    /// The contract that defines the customer structure.
    /// </summary>
    [DataContract]
    public class Customer
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Gets or sets the customer forename.
        /// </summary>
        [DataMember]
        public string Forename { get; set; }

        /// <summary>
        /// Gets or sets the customer surname.
        /// </summary>
        [DataMember]
        public string Surname { get; set; }

        /// <summary>
        /// Gets or sets the date of birth of the customer
        /// </summary>
        [DataMember]
        public DateTime DateOfBirth { get; set; }

        /// <summary>
        /// Gets the Id of the customer.
        /// </summary>
        [DataMember]
        public int Id { get; internal set; }
    }
}

As you can see, it's POCO. Now, the point here is that you don't add this as a class library into your Silverlight application. What you do, is import the service reference into your Silverlight application, so it gets access to the contract (and all the other gubbins it needs, such as the OperationContract). You now have a nice separation in place which means that you can leverage things such as web farms to manage scalability of your service.

As you are new at this, I would recommend buying a book and reading up on this. There's a lot to it, and it's well worth the investment. The book I usually recommend for Silverlight is Silverlight 4 Unleashed[^] by MVP and Mix speaker, Laurent Bugnion.

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Forgive your enemies - it messes with their heads

Johnny J.14-Apr-11 2:26

14-Apr-11 2:26

All this is quite new to me, I've never used neither Silverlight nor WCF before and my knowledge about those techniques is quite limited, hence the stupid questions.

Thanks for having patience with me, though. I get your point above to a certain point. But isn't it so (with reference to your example) that the Customer class with its DataContract attributes needs to be defined and have identical definitions on both sides of the WCF wall? That is at least what I seem to recall having read somewhere.

Thanks for the book recommendation. I actually ordered that very book yesterday. But since it's going to take some time for it to arrive, I thought I'd get going by asking stupid questions in this Forum in the meanwhile... Big Grin | :-D

Pete O'Hanlon14-Apr-11 2:52

14-Apr-11 2:52

Johnny J. wrote:
But isn't it so (with reference to your example) that the Customer class with
its DataContract attributes needs to be defined and have identical definitions
on both sides of the WCF wall?

Yes, but when you import the service reference, that comes with it. In other words, the proxy implementation that your Silverlight service calls is created for you - that's cool.

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Forgive your enemies - it messes with their heads

Johnny J.14-Apr-11 2:55

14-Apr-11 2:55

So when you change somthing in your service, you need to refresh or delete/readd your service reference?

Pete O'Hanlon14-Apr-11 3:19

14-Apr-11 3:19

Yes. You import the contract, which creates a proxy implementation.

I'm not a stalker, I just know things. Oh by the way, you're out of milk.

Forgive your enemies - it messes with their heads

Mycroft Holmes15-Apr-11 0:24

Mycroft Holmes

15-Apr-11 0:24

You need to pay Pete with a 5, thats an excellent explanation. Once you get over the initial STEEP learning curve it does make some sense. I got lucky, a corporate policy that the desktop is not allowed to connect directly to a database forced us to WCF and the move to SL was a natural from there.

I create the WCF in a separate project, the bulk of it can be built by a code generator as the CRUD operations (model and DAL/controller) are very standard.

The only real drawback that I have found is that a WCF does not allow a dynamic structure. Think of query a procedure an then just throw the result at a datagirdview in winforms, this is not the way SL/WPF works, EVERY thing needs to be defined, all the properties for the proc need to be in a model and that needs to be imported into the client and then you can use it in a datagrid. There is a work around for the dynamic stuff but it is painful.

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH

Johnny J.15-Apr-11 0:26

15-Apr-11 0:26

You can have a 5 both of you. Thanks a lot for the help. Right now, it does look like gibberish to me. I hope that when I get the book, things will brighten a bit... Wink | ;)

Why can't I be applicable like John? - Me, April 2011
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Beidh ceol, caint agus craic againn - Seán Bán Breathnach
-----
Da mihi sis crustum Etruscum cum omnibus in eo!
-----
Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects - Will Rogers, 1924

Pete O'Hanlon15-Apr-11 0:56

15-Apr-11 0:56

Mycroft Holmes wrote:
WCF does not allow a dynamic structure

Excellent point. You're right that you can get round it, but the effort of doing so doesn't justify the development needed to do it. I've been playing around with parsing dynamic ODATA structures, and it's just so much boilerplate and jiggery pokery that I'm seriously wishing I hadn't started it.

Forgive your enemies - it messes with their heads

My blog | My articles | MoXAML PowerToys | Mole 2010 - debugging made easier - my favourite utility