AMAZING! That’s all I can say about this 14.1 release of Infragistics WPF and Silverlight controls. This is the most feature packed release we have had since I started working at Infragistics over 2 years ago. I am really excited about the new controls we are giving you early access to, the new features that will remove hundreds of lines of XAML from your views, the improved MVVM support, and the new themes and style…

It’s time to start the third annual Infragistics User Group Contest for 2014.  This contest started as a way to help break the ice and loosen up the attendees during my sessions at the user groups I would present at.  Once the groups learned they would be competing with other like-minded groups of people from around the country, the competition was on!  Now, this contest has grown beyond the user groups I present at, beyond…

At the beginning of the 2013 year, I announced the start of the Infragistics User Group Contest for 2013.  The contest started in 2012 as a fun way to break the ice at the various user groups I would speak at.  Due to the success of the contest, it quickly expanded to the rest of the evangelist team at Infragistics.  Now, in 2013, we have had over three times the number of entries compared to 2012.  Needless to say, this…

With the release of Windows 8, the era of touch devices is in full swing.  Manufacturers are scrambling to create mobile devices that can run Microsoft Windows with the touch of a finger, without the need for a keyboard and mouse.  Even Microsoft has released their very own Surface brand to satisfy this need to run Windows in a mobile world.  This is all fine and dandy if you are building Windows Store applications that…

Shhhh… Do you hear that?  That’s the sound of another mind blowing, face melting, feature packed, Chuck Norris* approved release of Infragistics WPF and Silverlight controls.  That’s right kiddies, this 13.2 release brings a number of new controls, new features, new themes, new styles, and much needed updates to an already industry leading WPF and Silverlight control suite.  Let’s stop wasting time and…

Roughly 7 months ago, we announced the release of a brand new product from Infragistics for Windows 8 development.  Now, it is time for another update to the Infragistics Windows UI control toolset with the release of 13.2.  In our first release of Windows UI 13.1 back in April, we had put so much awesomeness into a single release, that we had to leave some great features out of the controls and had to leave them as a CTP…

In case you missed it, Microsoft’s mainstream support for Silverlight 4 has ended.  Technically it ended in January of 2013, but you wouldn’t know that unless you keep up to date with Microsoft’s Silverlight Support Lifecycle, or you tried to open a Silverlight 4 application in Visual Studio 2013.  Then you will immediately notice that it was automatically upgraded to Silverlight 5.  You might also notice that if you…

As most of you know, Visual Studio 2013 is about to be released early to MSDN subscribers.  If you are one of the lucky individuals that get access to these early bits, and start installing the latest version of Infragistics Ultimate 13.1, you will notice that the current installer does not recognize VS2013 for the Infragistics Visual Studio Extension and the Version Utility.

Honestly, you will only care about this if…

I’m hitting the road again for another awesome user group tour.  This time I am going to Ohio!  I am calling it the CDC tour.  As you can tell from the title of this post, I get to have some fun with a little play on words with this one.  It’s called the CDC tour because I will be speaking a four user groups in the cities of Columbus, Dayton, and Cincinnati.

My first stop will be at the Windows Developer User Group on Oct…

If you are using the Infragistics xamDockManager control and using MVVM to compose your views, then you have probably asked yourself the question, “How do I data bind a collection of objects, which represent my Views, from my ViewModel to various areas of the xamDockManager?”.  You are asking yourself this question because the xamDockManager doesn’t support this data binding out of the box.  The good news…

Shhhhh…. Do you hear that?????  That’s the sound of another great FREE theme!

Today’s theme is the highly requested Office 2010 Blue theme.  The Office 2010 Blue theme takes it’s visual cues from the Microsoft Office 2010 product suite.  This is probably the most popular theme among Windows developers.  Why?  Well ,let’s face it!  Most clients want all their apps to look like Outlook and Excel…

If you were in the Mariette Georgia area on Saturday August 24, I hope you stopped by the Atlanta Code Camp for a day of food, fun, and technology.  There were a variety of great topics being presented by great speakers.

For speakers, most code camps start off with a speaker dinner the night before the event.  This is where all the organizers, volunteers, and speakers get together to hang out and relax before the big show…

It’s that time again!  Time for another free WPF and Silverlight theme for the Microsoft controls.  The last free theme I gave away was the Metro Light and Dark Themes for WPF and Silverlight Microsoft controls.  Soon after I released that theme, there was an overwhelming positive response from the community.  So, I am fulfilling the promise I made in my last post.  I am releasing another free theme.

Today’s free theme…

If you develop WPF applications with Prism, then you are probably already aware of the many ways in which you can load a module.  Loading a module starts with what is called a ModuleCatalog.  You can’t load a module unless it has been added to a ModuleCatalog.  Once the module has been added to a ModuleCatalog, Prism will then take care of loading the module assembly for you.  Prism even comes with a handful of module…

If you write your own WPF custom controls, you are probably aware of how to go about adding theming support for the various Windows themes.  One of the more popular themes introduced in Windows Vista, and continued over to Windows 7, was the Aero theme.  This is all fine and dandy if your WPF custom controls are used in applications that only run on Vista and Windows 7, but what happens when you try to use them on Windows…

The last five weeks have been crazy for me!  The first week of June I was at TechEd, where I appeared on Channel 9 Visual Studio Toolbox, and where I found out that the Microsoft Patterns and Practices team recognized me as a P&P Champion.  The next week was spent traveling through New Orleans and various cities in Mississippi.  Then I actually got to go home for a week before heading off to San Francisco to attend the…

While I was at TechEd in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago, I received a bit of surprising news.  The great people at Microsoft Patterns & Practices have recognized my community contributions with Prism and Prism for Windows Runtime by honoring me as a P&P Champion.  This is not an award that comes with a fancy plaque, or a impressive badge.  This is simply a recognition.  I see it as a gesture to say “Thank You”…

Dealing with menus and floating windows is a real pain in the butt!  If you have written any type of WPF MDI (Multi Document Interface) application you know exactly what I am talking about.  Focus management in WPF is a real pain in itself.  Having to worry about Keyboard focus, Logical focus, and focus scope just makes you want to pull the hair out of your head.  Now start throwing in child windows and things get really…

I know this is no ground breaking, mind blowing secret trick, but I have been getting a surprising number of questions regarding how to find the parent of a specific type for a control.  The ability to find a parent control based on a type comes in real handy when dynamically composing views such as in a Prism application.  There are tons of other scenarios where this is useful, but the most recent request for this was…

The quest for a good application theme never ends.  You spend hours scouring the realms of Google and Bing looking for a clean, modern, and touch friendly theme to use in your application.  That is, until now!  If you have been looking for a free Metro theme for WPF and Silverlight, then look no further.

Infragistics ships a number of great themes with their NetAdvantage for WPF and Silverlight products.  As the Product Manager…

The Problem

If you have used the Infragistics xamDialogWindow control in your WPF or Silverlight application, I can probably guess your biggest complaint with the control.  I know what mine is!  Currently, the XamDialogWindow has to be part of the visual tree in order for you to use it in your View.  What do I mean by that?  It means that you have to predefine your XamDialogWindow above the top most element in your View,…

I am very excited to announce the immediate availability of the newest member of the Infragistics NetAdvantage for WPF and Silverlight control suites, the xamRichTextEditor.  What is the xamRichTextEditor?  The xamRichTextEditor is a highly customizable cross-platform WPF and Silverlight control that allows you to edit rich text documents.  Think of it as a version of Microsoft Word that you can drag and drop onto your Visual…

I recently received a question regarding support for keyboard shortcuts for changing groups in the Infragistics WPF xamOutlookBar.  If you are a user of Microsoft Outlook, you may have noticed that you can navigate to the different outlook groups using simple keyboard shortcuts.  For example, you can press CRTL+2 to navigate to the Calendar group, or CRTL+3 to navigate to the Contacts group.  The idea here is that a user…

Well, it has been exactly one week since I presented at the Ft. Wayne .NET User Group in Ft. Wayne Indiana.  Why did it take me so long to write my follow up post?  What can I say, I’m a busy guy.  What matters is that I have time now.  So here it goes.

I flew into Indiana on April 13, because I have family in South Bend.  Which, luckily for me, is only an hour away from Ft. Wayne.  So it was a no-brainer.  After visiting…

It has been four months since my last review of the Planar Helium 27” Touch Display.  If you read my initial review, the display didn’t fare so well in my brightly lit home office.  In fact, my final grade was an F, which may have been a little harsh, but that was my feeling at the time with the display I received.

After writing that review, the great people at Planar promptly contact me to help fix the issues I was having…