Demo Overview

This demo was presented at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in September 2005 by Rob Relyea as part of the Lap Around Windows Presentation Foundation ("Avalon") talk. [PRS305]

http://robrelyea.com/events/pdc2005/ will be maintained with any updates, pointers to slides, recordings, etc...

To Build and Run

Use Visual Studio or msbuild from the command line to build.

File Descriptions for the Lap Around WPF Demo

Window1.xaml
User interface description for primary window of this application.

In the live demo of this, data was embedded into this file directly with <my:Patient /> tags.
In this version of the demo, I created a PatientCollection class that was used as the ItemsSource of the ListBox (it had some hard coded patients added in the constructor of the collection.)

Window1.xaml.cs
Event handling logic for Window1.xaml. It has event handlers for the "Add New Patient" button, zoom level slider, and window resize.

PatientPhotos\*.jpg
Photos for each patient. In a non-demo, clearly these data images wouldn't be hard coded into the application itself. They would likely be used from a server, or perhaps downloaded and cached on the client.

Images\
contoso.jpg - image that was eventually in the application. At the end of the application, it was not used.
contoso.ico - icon for title bar of application's window.

BusinessObjects\patient.cs
Patient class - Business object representing a Patient.
PatientCollection class - Collection of patients. Subclasses observableCollection so that databinding gets automatic knowledge of changes to the collection.

Diagnoses\*.xaml
FlowDocuments that are displayed when the "Diagnosis Detail" hyperlink is clicked.

Dictionaries\Vectors.xaml
PDC CTP is the first time we have support for merging dictionaries into normal resource resolution path. MyApp.xaml includes Vectors.xaml into its ResourceDictionary.

There are a few options of how to include a vector image into your xaml files in the PDC release:

Copy and paste contosologo.xaml into window1.xaml. That would give you a very unweildy xaml file.
Build a custom element using markup compilation. Use x:Class="ContosoLogo" in the root element of ContosoLogo.xaml. Include that file as part of the project. Also include ContosoLogo.xaml.cs with a call to InitializeComponent. During build of the project, it will generate a new class called ContosoLogo. At runtime, <my:ContosoLogo /> in window1.xaml creates the logo. (This is what I did in the actual PDC talk.
Put elements in a resource dictionary and refer to it with <StaticResource />. This is what this version of the demo does.

PatientDetail
PDC CTP has added support for UserControls. PatientDetail.xaml and PatientDetail.xaml.cs create a new PatientDetail usercontrol. Window1.xaml uses that control with: <my:PatientDetail />

There is a 3d animation whenever the datacontext of this control changes. Ideally, the ViewPort3D and storyboard would be factored into a separate control instead of being added into this control. That is an interesting exercise for the reader. In Window1.xaml, you would then use something like this: <custom:TransitionAnimation Effect="FlipDown" PropertyToWatch="DataContext"> <my:PatientDetail ... /> </custom:TransitionAnimation />

Notice that there is a binding in Window1.xaml that binds the listbox's selectedItem with the datacontext of the PatientDetail.

The Chart control used in this user control is ChartFX from SoftwareFX.

Treatment of Colors

This demo code has too many hard coded colors, which makes accessibility more difficult. I will be pointing to guidelines on how to avoid that soon. Stay tuned to the website.

Animation

This demo should be enhanced to check the capabilities of the system before doing the 3d animation.

Occassionally the animation appears to stick at the end of the flip. I've tried to work around that issue with some success. It is caused by a bug in the WPF September 2005 CTP.