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In continuation to my previous article titled ' Dynamically selecting DataTemplate for WPF ListView ', in this article, I am discussing about the alternative way to achieve the same goal. But here, to make the example simple, I am going to display only Employee names as shown below: Now this to achieve this, I am going to inherit MarkupExtension class provided by Microsoft. This class will give me the DataTemplate. If you will explore further, you will came to know that this MarkupExtension class has only one method named as ProvideValue, which will return me the appropriate template based on the supplied value.  Before inheriting MarkupExtension, I created a class named MyDataTemplateDictionary, which will inherit Dictionary<object, DataTemplate>. Please note, here key will be my DataTemplate name and value will be the DataTemplate. Below is the code depicting the same: Next comes is the class inheriting MarkupExtension. As there is nothing ...

Recently I get a chance to work on a project in which requirement was to select different different types of data templates based on the data. I faced bit difficulty, but afterwards I was manage to get it work. Let's have a look at the scenario first: Inside a WPF ListView, there are two GridViewColumns for storing Name and Age. Now requirement is to highlight the name of the person based on certain age criteria. If age is below 25, then name should be highlighted as red else it should be in green color, with desired background. I know there are ways to implement this using the concept of triggers, but I personally refrain from using triggers due to performance fall back. So, what else ??? The option left was dynamically selecting data templates. In this post I am going to write about the simplest approach and later on I'll do the same thing using Dictionary. Well, let's begin with our code. First of all, I created a class named Employee and added some data which w...

DataTemplate is a very powerful concept which allows you to provide a visualization for your objects in your application. DataTemplate objects are very useful specially dealing with collections. If you bind your collection with any of the ItemsControl, say ListBox then by using a DateTemplate one can change the appearance of data objects very easily. Well, now let's create a DataTemplate quickly. Let's start by creating a class called Employee: FirstName and Age will be our business objects that will reside in our application. Now we will go ahead and show the value of these objects on screen in a WPF application. For that our XAML will look like: Now looking at the code-behind: In code-behind, we have set the values for FirstName and Age with DataContext of main window. So, that XAML can bind to these values via EmployeeDetail property. At this point of time, if you will run the application, you will see: By above image yo...

Recently I get a chance for a code walk through of an WPF application in order to achieve better performance. So, during my review process, I came across this below code snippet:   <WrapPanel>         <TextBlock Text="{Binding Path=FirstName,Mode=OneWay}"/>         <TextBlock Text=" "/>         <TextBlock Text="{Binding Path=LastName,Mode=OneWay}"/>     </WrapPanel> If you will closely analyze this given snippet, you will definitely get a way to optimize it. Well, I am talking  about formatting the string as well as binding part. As most of you are aware that we have a property named StringFormat since .Net 3.5 SP1. So, why can't we use this StringFormat for our binding too. If you want to change the above code to incorporate StringFormat , then it will something look like: <WrapPanel>         <TextBlock>     ...