CSS Preprocessors – Sass, Less, Stylus

CSS has been around for a while and will stay for a while longer and although I think it’s a good and working ‘language’ it has a few pitfalls – the biggest one being the lack of ability to reuse certain parts. Take colors for example, when you want to style a site you need to repeat the color declaration everywhere you want to set it, so when you change your mind, the only way to implement the changes is search and replace. Now that’s not that bad when you have a small site and one css file, but when the number of files grows, that problem grows along. So what can we do?

Simple, bindable PieChart in WPF

Today I will show you a simple way to have a pie chart in your WPF application with use of ItemsControl. The pieces of the pie will be binded to the undergoing item model collection. Let’s take a look at it.

Semantic Versioning

We’ve been using semantic versioning for a while now and it’s been paying out. Though there were some ‘quirks’. Now, version 2.0 is (almost) out and guess what, it addresses them! Let’s take a look at the new version and see what changed.

Private Deploy of EF with SQL CE 4.0 and Click Once

Recently I faced the problem with deploying an WPF application, which uses Entity Framework and Sql Server Compact 4.0 nuget packages. The application was deployed automatically by TFS Server as a Click Once  installer. The problem was that the setup did not download Sql Server package at client machine and application could not work. Apart from checking what is maybe wrong on TFS side configuration, the simplest solution was to do a so called Private Deploy of the Sql CE libraries. Unfortunately it turned out to not be easy too.

Simple validation in WPF MvvM Part 2

In a previous post I showed you how to use IDataErrorInfo interface to implement simple validation mechanism in WPF MvvM application. In this post we will try to extend and customize this approach a little.

Simple validation in WPF MvvM using IDataErrorInfo

In this post I will try to demonstrate the simplest validation approach for Windows Presentation Foundation application designed in Model View View-Model pattern.

We will be using data binding and IDataErrorInfo implementation.

Parametrized BooleanToVisibilityConverter

Windows Presentation Foundation allows us to create our own value converters and use them in XAML bindings. WPF also comes with a set of predefined converters. One of them is BooleanToVisibilityConverter. It this post I will show you how to create own version of this converter with parameter feature supported.

Gradient generator for WPF

Have you ever straggled with generating and polishing gradient for wpf in xaml? I did many times. Did you use any tool for that, except Visual Studio Property tab? I didn’t. Until I stumble upon Online Gradient Maker.

Because empty tags are bad

Well, not always, but there are times when they are so…what can I do to avoid them.

Custom WPF check box with inner shadow effect.

Today I will show you how to override the CheckBox control template to style it in custom way and add a sexy looking shadow effect.