Rohaili Software Development

Let me start by saying this is a weird one. If you are installing VS and you notice that progress bar just isn't moving. Chances are it is stuck on something internally, to kick it out of this state, we "threaten" visual studio by initiating a windows shut down. This will result in windows prompting you to make sure you want to follow through. You can cancel out of the shutdown, and it should release visual studio from the stuck progress bar or what ever perpetual task it was stuck on.

For starters, winforms will complain that you cannot set the background of the form to transparent. After a little digging, I found on a stack over flow  post that you can set the background to an obscure colour like limegreen. Lo and behold, we have a properly transparent form. I was using this for a quick and dirty way to select an area to screen capture. However there is one issue. The transparent form results in the click events going through to what ever is underneath it. As illustrated in the screen shot above, you can select text directly underneath it. This is pretty cool, especially if TopMost is set to true. However...the grip resize was also not being triggered. In other words, I cannot resize the new form. If the grip was on top of the parent form, then the resize event would work.  I tried a few approaches, such as intercepting the hittest, a few interops. But in the end the solution was quite simple.If you set the background colour to AliceBlue...

LINQ can be used to dynamically and quickly parse XML. The following data can be read in like so: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 <root> <Element> <Name> ..... </Name> <Height> ..... </Height> </Element> <Element> <Name> ..... </Name> <Height> ..... </Height> </Element> </root> 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 XDocument doc = XDocument .Load( "file.xml" ); var collection = from r in doc.Descendants( "Element" ) select new { Name = r.Element( "Name" ).Value, Height = r.Element( "Height" ).Value, }; foreach ( var element in collection) { // Properties can be accessed like an object // element.Name; // element.Height; }

If you are using windows 10 and the file menu opens on the left side, here is a fix: Run (Win+R) paste the following: shell:::{80F3F1D5-FECA-45F3-BC32-752C152E456E} click "Other" tab choose "Left-handed" Now the menu should open within the window:

ContextMenu has an issue that results in the menu being initially disabled. Regardless of whether what they are bound to is set to enabled or disabled. This will be true until a valid left click is done, usually on a button or the content it self. The root cause is that the ContextMenu is on a separate visual and logical tree than the window. This results in the items being disabled initially until a click is made first (not right click, but left click). Adding the following in the XAML to the menu item will resolve this issue: 1 <MenuItem Head... CommandTarget="{Binding Path=PlacementTarget, RelativeSource={RelativeSource AncestorType=ContextMenu}}" />

If you are performing an extensive operation that has multiple UI updates, for example in a loop, then you can use the following code to keep the UI updated alongside the operation. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 private void UpdateUI() { DispatcherFrame update = new DispatcherFrame(); Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher.BeginInvoke(DispatcherPriority.Background, new DispatcherOperationCallback( delegate ( object parameter) { update.Continue = false ; return null ; }), null ); Dispatcher.PushFrame(update); } Simply call that function inside your loop and the UI will update. Note, I have set the priority to background, you may have to set that to "Render"