It's a rule that should never be forgotten - don't ever perform work that takes a non-trivial amount of time on the UI thread. Of course you're now wondering, "Where do I perform tasks that take a non-trivial amount of time?". The answer is simple - on a different thread. There are lots of ways to get your work onto another thread, which can include directly creating a Thread or using the ThreadPool.

Bindings are a major part of WPF, and a big part of what makes it quick to create user interfaces in. They can be a little wordy and hard to debug sometimes, but overall they are extremely useful. Hopefully, after today's tutorial, you will find them even more useful - because today we are going to talk about building validation rules right into your bindings. Yup, you heard right - bindings in WPF have built in support for validation, and a number of the common controls have built in ways for displaying validation errors.

WPF comes with a large number of built in controls, but from the beginning it has lacked something that many application developers find extremely important - a DataGrid. You can use the ListView to create something approximating a DataGrid (I've talked about it in a couple different tutorials), but it is a lot of work and not particularly straightforward. Thankfully, Microsoft realizes how important a full-featured DataGrid is - and how you probably don't want to wait for the next version of WPF to be able to use one. This is where the WPF Toolkit comes in. The WPF Toolkit is "a collection of WPF features and components that are being made available outside of the normal .NET Framework ship cycle" which to me translates as "handy new controls I don't have to wait for".

Global attributes aren't something that many C# developers use often, however almost every application contains them, whether you're aware of them or not. Global attributes are a great way to store meta information for a specific assembly or module.

Global attributes are split into two categories: assembly and module. A module is a single code file and an assembly is a single DLL or executable. An assembly can contain several modules and a module can contain several classes.

Isn't it really annoying when WPF binding errors fail silently? The application compiles, the application runs, but nothing is working - all because of a silly typo in a binding somewhere. And then, once you realize it is a binding error (which is not always obvious), you have to drudge through the debug output trying to find that one line that says "System.Windows.Data Error ....". Even worse than that is the subtle binding error where the app still works, but maybe the text on some label isn't updating right, and you don't even notice the bug until weeks later.

At some point with any decently complex project, you are going to need to start customizing your build process. Visual Studio makes this possible, and not too terribly painful, by giving developers the ability to write custom MSBuild project files. But eventually, you are going to hit the limit of what the MSBuild XML syntax can do for you - but when you reach that point, there is something else waiting - custom tasks! MSBuild gives you the ability to write custom build tasks in C# (or any .NET language), and use those tasks inside of MSBuild project files. We are going to be taking a look today at how to create these tasks and how to use them.

So here's the problem - say you have a WPF TextBlock with some text (with automatic ellipsing turned on) and you want to know if the text is actually ellipsed at the moment. Sounds simple, right? Unfortunately, there are no properties or methods that you can call to check - well, no public properties or methods, that is. So this makes a simple question into a much harder answer.

One very convenient features in windows is the Taskbar. To make it even better, those little icons can make something so "out of the way" that you can forget what is even down there. But, sometimes you want your applications to hang down there, out of the way, doing something that requires little attention. You can even make some notification bubbles show up if you want.

We have taken a look at printing in WPF twice before here at SOTC - first with a simple tutorial on just getting something printed, and then a more complex one on pagination. Today we are not going to focus much on the printing side of things, but more on the printer side. For example, how do you get a list of the printers available on the system? Or their capabilities? If you need the answers to those questions, then this is the tutorial for you.

Let's say you have two or more separate images and you'd like to combine those into a single image using C#. That's what this tutorial is going to demonstrate. We're going to create a function that takes multiple images and combines them into a large panoramic.